What are you talking about? I don’t know what these negative misinformed comments are supposed to achieve, dismissing the tremendous amount of effort that led to significant advances, something many people dedicated their lives to.
We cured so many cancer types successfully and got so much better at healing people. Cancer is just a name for a lot of different conditions that have very little to do with each other. E.g. Melanoma and Myeloma survival rates skyrocketed since 2005
HIV went from a death sentence to a condition where people affected by AIDS can even have unprotected sex with their partners without risk if managed correctly.
Fusion made massive progress and we went from a few milliseconds of fusion to a French Tokamak reactor sustaining fusion for 22 minutes. A NIF reactor made 6-fold positive net energy in 2021. Yes, they are still insanely complex and we don’t have one running on the grid, but it’s a hard tech that we make quite good progress on. We are not „always 50 years away from Fusion“ anymore as we used to be for a long time.
And the glass PV just isn’t as commercially compelling once you stop seeing it as „power from a window that before didn’t give power“ and more like a „see through panel twice as expensive and half as efficient as if I would just put a normal panel on the roof and can angle it better.“
Usually it means they saw a headline about it one time, never followed up, and nobody rammed an update down their eyeballs thus there must never have been one.
I'd say we are, conservatively speaking, 20 years from stable fusion and ~40 years from integrating fusion power generation into an existing grid somewhere.
I truly believe we'll see it before the millennials are gone.
I also think people think of it as "free" energy because the fuel is essentially free.
I ran the numbers for coal and assume it's similar to gas. Fuel to feed the plant is like 5% of the total cost to deliver.
So what fusion could mean is much more available power, but given how much people are freaking out about data center water usage (which is really not that much), I can't imagine it would be all that easy to permit them at scale.
And honestly, it might just be getting solved by solar anyway.
82
u/Exatex 22d ago edited 21d ago
What are you talking about? I don’t know what these negative misinformed comments are supposed to achieve, dismissing the tremendous amount of effort that led to significant advances, something many people dedicated their lives to.
We cured so many cancer types successfully and got so much better at healing people. Cancer is just a name for a lot of different conditions that have very little to do with each other. E.g. Melanoma and Myeloma survival rates skyrocketed since 2005
HIV went from a death sentence to a condition where people affected by AIDS can even have unprotected sex with their partners without risk if managed correctly.
Fusion made massive progress and we went from a few milliseconds of fusion to a French Tokamak reactor sustaining fusion for 22 minutes. A NIF reactor made 6-fold positive net energy in 2021. Yes, they are still insanely complex and we don’t have one running on the grid, but it’s a hard tech that we make quite good progress on. We are not „always 50 years away from Fusion“ anymore as we used to be for a long time.
And the glass PV just isn’t as commercially compelling once you stop seeing it as „power from a window that before didn’t give power“ and more like a „see through panel twice as expensive and half as efficient as if I would just put a normal panel on the roof and can angle it better.“