this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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Fusion is very hard. There's been some intriguing progress and I do believe we'll get there – and maybe sooner than many think – but to have a real effect on the climate change timeline I think we'd need to be just about finished with the experimental phase now (if not several years ago) and moving into widespread scale-up. That's just not realistic at this point, unfortunately. So while promising in the long view, I wouldn't bet on it solving any of our near-term problems.
(Edit: and that's ignoring the practical issues of sourcing the required amounts of deuterium / tritium and beryllium, which would rapidly exceed the entire world output under any kind of real scale-up)
Ugh don’t make me think about the tritium issue… I think we’ll get there too, but it should have been yesterday as you said…
Well at least we got voice controlled lights before the end of the world, that’s something… /s