this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
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Excellent news. Small steps to hopefully thread the needle with. Don't be discouraging, people, we need success and vigor.
We need renewables now, not viable fusion two decades from now.
It's gonna be both. Only a simpleton would be worried others think that way.
Why not both? 😅
Sure, I'm on board with that. But unfortunately all to often hype around fusion is a red herring by the fossil fuel industry :c
It's safer for their finances to have the public entertain a pipe dream, rather than a reality check.
Sorry, that's false. Is it potentially being co-opted as a distraction by those industries? Yes, in fact probably because of how scummy fossil fuel industries are.
That doesn't mean anyone is under the illusion that this is a replacement for renewables now. Grow up.
This is still, long term, research ave development which needs to be done.
I think the point [email protected] was trying to make is that we see news of countries abandoning renewables everywhere, recently, and that the fossil fuel industry is probably partly at play there. And then, they use such red herrings to stop the public from worrying. I can totally see this happening, to be honest.
Why not state it the way you did? Succinctly, I'd have said "we need the current renewables effort to continue, along with this great longer-term research". Bam, done.
Not "we need renewables now, not fusion in 30yrs" with the accompanying clown sounds.
may I ask why you're so hostile?
As for my point:
Fusion is still a long way from being scalable and commercially viable, and every year we continue burning coal drives us closer to extinction. So we need to work with what we have now, and fast. When we get viable fusion in the future, great, we'll have secured energy stability even more and maybe made it cheaper (that's a maybe). But at the moment, we need to invest into renewables more. Orders of magnitude more.
I'm just tired of click-baity articles like this. Fusion's been 10-20 years away for more than half a century now, and while I don't doubt that we're making progress towards it, it won't be ready in time to be the replacement for coal we are hoping for.
First point is not relevant, fusion has been chronically underfunded for far too long. The money being spent on fusion r&d is far less than the money going to renewables deployment, and you advocate cannabilizing even that???
I won't go down the list of how many technical contributions are coming out of fusion, just know that there are a lot, that help make both renewables and non-renewable more efficient. How do you switch tremendous amounts of current at extreme voltages, very quickly? The answer directly impacts overall efficiency of everything from EVs to micro & macro-grids. Usually it's a pick-two-of-the-three, but switch systems are being used to solve these exact issues, successfully.
As for why I'm hostile? Read the previous two paragraphs again, maybe something will jump out at you.