Why fusion, over everything else?

[u/Sun_In_A_Bottle]

$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?!

[u/3z3ki3l]

Why only 4,000 workers? Because it doesn’t work yet.

As for why fusion? Because the entire global economy is speculative, and the options everyone’s betting on are:

A) The candle burns to the bottom of the wick, and our planet along with it, or

B) fusion.

Seriously, that’s why. We can stretch our level of production for a few more centuries if we’re careful (and remain lucky with our collective nuclear armaments), but we won’t be able to reverse any of the damage we’ve done to our planet without fusion.

Whereas with fusion then astroid mining becomes more profitable than earthside digging, automation becomes increasingly reasonable in almost all industries, and we can actually reach escape velocity as a society.

Edit/also: As for why $15B in the last five years? Because we’re close. (We think.) And because the first people to do it basically own the future. Not that it would remain truly proprietary, but a few years head start puts the organization that does it in a position of unimaginable wealth and power.

[u/Sad_Dimension423 → u/3z3ki3l]

As for why $15B in the last five years? Because we’re close. (We think.)

My theory is that the fusion people look at the drop in price of renewables and know it's now or never. If there's no tomorrow, they can promise the world and it doesn't matter. They either win big now or change careers.

[u/3z3ki3l → u/Sad_Dimension423]

Perhaps. But there’s still scenarios where fusion would pay off a hundredfold, even if everything on earth was powered by renewables.

Like I said, they’re betting on more than just the energy consumption of the planet. They’re betting on what happens when we put one on the moon, and further. That’s why all these billionaires have space agencies.

It’s a high-risk high-reward bet for sure, but if they’re right then the benefit is astronomical. Because there actually are a number of engineering problems that we can basically throw energy at to solve. Provided we have it available in a dense enough form.

[u/Chrontius → u/3z3ki3l]

Places where power density is a constraint, or where it makes sense to give a bigass customer a dedicated power supply, for example.

[u/Sad_Dimension423 → u/Chrontius]

Why would fission not be workable for such customers? For example, on ships, fission reactors are probably much more practical, given power density differences.

[u/ZorbaTHut → u/Sad_Dimension423]

Fission has a lot of legitimate ecological issues that make it (coincidentally) kinda politically toxic. We use it on military ships anyway because the military doesn't give a shit, but it's effectively offlimits for commercial ships, even though switching over oil tankers, cargo ships, and cruise liners to fission would be an absolutely gargantuan environmental improvement.

I would love for us to accept the tradeoff here - it's a great tradeoff - but it's unlikely to happen for political reasons.

 

I could write a multi-paragraph rant about my feelings about the historical environmentalist movement. It would get me banned from many subreddits.

[u/andyfrance → u/ZorbaTHut]

There have been a handful of nuclear powered cargo ships. None were a commercial success and one was even converted to diesel.

There are however a few nuclear powered icebreakers that are very successful.

[u/ZorbaTHut → u/andyfrance]

If you really try, enough regulations and bureaucracy can make anything impractical.

[u/andyfrance → u/ZorbaTHut]

True. And a great source of income for the lawyers too. Both sides of the legal proceedings make money out of it. The judge too if it needs deciding in court, or judges when the appeal process gets triggered.

[u/ZorbaTHut → u/andyfrance]

Yeah. It's an unfortunate situation overall.