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by mkaic 1546 days ago
Oh believe me, climate change scares the heck out of me too :)

I'm really really really rooting for fusion energy to work out soon and solve the energy crisis, but in the meantime I think we need to hard pivot to as much fission energy as possible, as well as convert to entirely electric transportation and shipping.

1 comments

I have some bad news for you I'm afraid - fusion is not going to be industrially useful on an ecologically relevant timescale. It's a lot like AGI in its "maybe the next generation will have this, but we won't" property.
General Fusion is building their test plant right now.
correct, but that doesn't mean they'll necessarily be rolling out thousands of them around the world next year or even in 5 years time.

There are tens of thousands of fossil fuel power stations around the world, and we globally consume around 138TWh of non-renewably-produced electricity per year (and growing fast).

I used the words "industrially useful" very deliberately. The goal is not to produce one fusion reactor that can run continuously over unity, the goal is to produce tens of thousands of them and have them deployed globally. That is a project that will take decades.