• Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
      3·
      10 days ago

      That’s not even a joke.

      The most pessimistic cost for ITER, the first real fusion reactor, is 65 billion dollars in total.

      In the last two years, we (people) have spent over 600 billion dollars on LLM shit. Mostly datacenters and GPUs.

    • darkdemize@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      10 days ago

      I’d always heard 30, but regardless, the unspoken part of that projection was the assumption that we adequately funded fusion research. That didn’t happen, hence why we’re 50 years into the 30 year project with nothing to show for it.

  • mech@feddit.org
    2·
    10 days ago

    Fusion has the exact same issue as every other “heat steam to drive a turbine” power plant:
    Cooling.
    There’s no way around it and you can calculate it.
    Power output in W * (100 - efficiency %) / 100 = Heat output
    That heat needs to go somewhere. Sure you can use it to heat homes in winter.
    But in summer, even along major rivers, power plants already need to throttle down in order to not kill all water life downstream and turn the river into smelly sludge. In summer there’s no demand for heat, there is more demand for electricity, there’s less water in the river, and that water is already warmer.

    Fusion power is no solution for this.
    Solar and wind power are. They don’t need to be cooled. And the technology already exists, and is cheaper than fossil fuels or nuclear TODAY. All we need to do is scale them up.

    • SethranKada@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      10 days ago

      There are fusion plants that directly extract usable power using magnetic fields. It’s not just a complicated steam power.

  • m_‮f@discuss.onlineEnglish
    1·
    10 days ago

    I don’t have any useful speculation to contribute, but here’s a classic chart showing various funding levels towards that goal:

    Coming from a slashdot thread from 2012 where some fusion researchers did an AMA type thing:

    https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fusion-researchers-answer-your-questions

    Here’s also a recent HN thread about achieving more energy than we put in:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33971377

    The crucial bit is this

    Their total power draw from the grid was 300 megajoules and they got back about 3 megajoules, so don’t start celebrating yet

    The critical ELI5 message that should have been presented is that they used a laser to create some tiny amount of fusion. But we have been able to do that for a while now. The important thing is that they were then able to use the heat and pressure of the laser generated fusion to create even more fusion. A tiny amount of fusion creates even more fusion, a positive feedback loop. The secondary fusion is still small, but it is more than the tiny amount of laser generated fusion. The gain is greater than one. That’s the important message. And for the future, the important takeaway is that the next step is to take the tiny amount of laser fusion to create a small amount of fusion, and that small amount of fusion to create a medium amount of fusion. And eventually scale it up enough that you have a large amount of fusion, but controlled, and not a gigantic amount of fusion that you have in thermonuclear weapons, or the ginormous fusion of the sun.

    So it’s still really encouraging, but just a warning that headlines don’t capture the full picture. Bonus fun fact from that thread:

    Theoretical models of the Sun’s interior indicate a maximum power density, or energy production, of approximately 276.5 watts per cubic metre at the center of the core, which is about the same power density inside a compost pile.

  • StinkyFingerItchyBum@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    10 days ago

    2 thoughts.

    1. Might be never.

    2. I’m not convinced it would be a good thing if we did. Natural systems find homeostasis that keep the system balanced. Human intelligence have systematically removed these natural barriers (tool use, agriculture, division of labour, metalurgy, medicine, industrial revolution, fossil fuels, green revolution, chemistry, computers etc…) as such, we blew past all semblance of sustainability. Each time we lifted a barrier that was a limiting factor, our population and environmental footprint grew exponentially.

    Now we are in a state of severe ecological overshoot. We have crossed 7 of 9 planetary boundaries. and our crisis is that we are converting our planet into something that can’t sustain us.

    If we figure out cold fusion, there is a better than not chance we will just lift one more barrier that will allow us to further destroy all the rest.

    I’m not against fusion energy if possible, I’m just not convinced it won’t be another nail in our coffin. I don’t see humanity’s maturity growing to accomodate our current technology to alter our likely fate, and near limitless energy solves humanity’s problems like carfentanyl solved the heroin addicts problems.