r/fusion • u/Sun_In_A_Bottle • 14d ago

Why fusion, over everything else?

$15.2 billion in private investment over the past 5 years!

For an industry that is projected to need 1 million workers by 2040, how is the global private workforce roughly ONLY 4,000?!

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u/3DDoxle 13d ago

Because if fusion works, everything changes. It would be like discovering penicillin or electric lighting. We've all used candles forever and then gas (nuclear, solar etc) comes along. Electric lights far outpace gas once they catch on.

It is not the best power source today and no one argues that it is. DT fusion in big reactors is just a stepping stone.

Lightweight fusion (like loaded in spacecraft) could make humanity an interplanetary species, among many other hypothetical goals.

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u/muffinsballhair 11d ago

It's entirely possible that commercial fusion will be viable at one point but nothing amazing, just another way to make clean energy that is commercially viable. It might even be the case that all that can be reached is a stage where it's profitable, but less profitable than fission but simply that governments subsidize it because it has no nuclear waste problem which makes up for the deficit, similar to how they subsidize many other forms of clean energy and transportation right now which wouldn't be as commercially viable without the subsidies.

It can go anywhere from “There is no practical way to make it commercially viable.” to “It is so viable that there is no reason for any company to do anything but fusion.”

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u/FrankScaramucci 13d ago

The fusion approaches that are likely to succeed wouldn't change that much. It's not even obvious they would change anything because it could end up being more expensive than fission.