Practical power production through nuclear fusion still requires significant developments for it to be realised at scale, though several startups are already planning to deliver it within the next few years.
US-based Helion Energy secured the world’s first purchase agreement for nuclear fusion energy in 2023, promising to provide 50MW of fusion power to Microsoft by 2028.
I mean, time will tell. But that seems a bit sooner than 2100.
spacesatan@leminal.space 1 day ago
Image If China’s economic ascendancy happened 50 years sooner we would probably already have it. Democracies are allergic to massive capital investments that take decades to pay off.
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 11 hours ago
A graph is not proof of fusion energy. Yelling at clouds would probably generate more net energy than all fusion research has to date.
It’s a dead end. It will never ever work. A combination of civilizational die-back and concomitant reduced energy use and a hodge-podge of renewable sources is the likely future for humanity.
And that’s my optimistic take.
My more realistic take is that we are running out of cheap easy energy. The kind of monstrously massive contraption filled with high-tech exotic materials that is a fusion reactor is exactly the kind of thing we will NOT be able to build anymore in the future.
It’s the same impasse that kills all the space fantasies (like people who think Avatar is just around the corner). If we HAD the resources to build fusion reactors or mine asteroids, we don’t HAVE a resource problem!
And if we have such a resource crunch that we think fusion/space is the only solution, we don’t have the resources to do it.
The future is horses, not Star Trek.
Get used to it.
spacesatan@leminal.space 9 hours ago
Oh shit somebody who can accurately be called a doomer. This feels like the time I ran into an actual naz-bol in the wild. It’s like spotting an overhyped cryptid, I thought they were more of a rhetorical device than actually real.