[willis936]

>Nobody knows any way to do this.

Correction: you don't know any way to do this.

https://www.osti.gov/pages/servlets/purl/1394392

Meanwhile the super expensive power plant can run in the winter and not require fossil fuels or magic energy storage.

[pencilguin]

The paper is about how to prevent production of tritium. It mentions breeding tritium, but not how to extract grams of it, every day and at negligible cost, from a thousand tons of lithium salt. So, my point stands.

Do futile jabs at renewables, which are being deployed at industrial scale as I write this, serve to make fusion startups less scammy?

[willis936]

Read section 4 again.

Renewables will not replace fossil fuels to an acceptable degree without first solving energy storage. The question is "is industrial energy storage cheaper than fusion energy". Not such a clear answer when the order of magnitude of either of those is not established.

Do futile jabs at fusion, but also try to keep in mind the goal is legacy, not identity.

[pencilguin]

Any civil engineer can explain numerous storage alternatives to you. It is all centuries-old tech, excepting only novel battery chemistries and catalysts.

[jpgvm]

A much cheaper fission plant does the same thing without all of the insane technical challenges of fusion.

[pencilguin]

And yet is also uncompetitive.

[jpgvm]

I don't think we built enough to really know that. Lets see how China goes for costs first and then reassess.