• Bjornir@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    1 year ago

    Commercial fusion is not a few years away, and I’ve never seen the claim apart from deranged individuals on Twitter. If everything goes to plan, commercial fusion won’t be here for a few decades.

    What the claim may have been is experimental fusion, which does exist right now, we have generated power using fusion, and we even made more power than we put into it recently. It’s moving, but it’s slow, as planned for the last few decades.

    • frezik@midwest.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      And even that “more power than we put into it” comes with a big asterisk. The power being output by the laser is smaller than the power being output by fusion. Big lasers tend to be grossly inefficient things. We’ll need at least 10 times the output in order to generate enough to power the laser. That’s not even considering the power usage of the facility around it.

      So, yeah, we’re at least a few years away from enough power for the laser to sustain itself, at least a few more to be able to run the facility and still have net power, and then at least a decade after that to get to commercialization.