Not free energy, but extremely cheap and plentiful fuel, with no basically no negative waste. It's pretty much the key to freeing up power, and with very cheap power comes so much. Whether that's AI, sun lamps for food, desalination plants etc etc.
Elusive fusion reactors to be commercialised by 2025-2030... Or so they say
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Not free energy, but extremely cheap and plentiful fuel, with no basically no negative waste. It's pretty much the key to freeing up power, and with very cheap power comes so much. Whether that's AI, sun lamps for food, desalination plants etc etc.
We just had our annual sales conference and our CEO had commonwealth fusion systems as a headline in his keynote speech, a one liner about how they're taking orders. Was the first I heard about it, but I'm gonna remain sceptical on it. Taking orders =/= proven and feasible
Gives us something to chat about, like flying cars and quantum computing.
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Ppl gotta find other futuristic stonks now the ai shine wore off. 
In theory: huge amounts of clean, cheap energy. It remains to see how near to that reality is.
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The fuel is almost limitless.
The reactor produces less, dangerous, radioactive material.
No chance of a meltdown.
The big question remains as to whether it can be economic.
I think a large part of the problem with traditional reactors is the public have it firmly lodged in their heads that they are dangerous. This doesn't need to be true. There are much safer Thorium reactors (sadly, developed by China) and waste recycling to reduce long-term waste (which was banned by many countries for proliferation fears, but something the UK could do).
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The stupid thing is that preferring fossil over nuclear hasn't just made power more expensive, less secure, and produced more carbon dioxide and other harmful atmospheric pollutants; it's also put more radiation into the environment! Even including Chernobyl and all the other nuclear incidents.
The article says they maintained a plasma, not fusion.
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I'm just going to keep quoting myself in this thread from multiple years ago, every time it reappears on the FP.
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Yes, and this was known back then as well. The scientists knew that coal was releasing more radiation in to the atmosphere, but no one listened.
It was fear from the public that destroyed our ability to build reactors. At one point we were world leaders, now we have to go cap in hand to the French, who kept those skills.
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And the Chinese, which is eyebrow raising in it's stupidity
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I wouldn't even say the big question is economics, they haven't even proven the concept yet.
Really? I understood lithium availability to be an issue for EVs. And neither deuterium nor tritium are common.
There's many millions of tonnes of deuterium on Earth. Tritium can be made on site at a fusion power station. Lithium availability is far less of an issue for nuclear fusion than it is for EVs because far less of it is needed.
"Almost limitless" is an overstatement, but we wouldn't be running out in a practical timeframe. The amount of fuel used by a fusion power station would be very small. The efficiency at which it converts fuel to energy is a big part of the attraction.
Even that's assuming future civilisation would stick with deuterium-tritium fusion. Which they probably wouldn't. That's the initial target not because it's the best but because it's the easiest.
A much bigger problem is that it doesn't work. Not in a practical sense. Maybe it will work, but it's not something to bet the farm on. We need stuff that we know works. Fission now, fusion later if it can be made practical. With as much renewables as is practical.
That depends on how you look at it. Fusion can be done on Earth, no question about it. That's been proven for decades. The problem is that it's too expensive in terms of both money and energy. So in that sense the big question is economics.
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It depends what you fuse, but Deuterium and Tritium occur naturally in seawater and there is more than enough to last mankind for a very long time. One mug of seawater is about equivalent to 18 gallons of oil.
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Lithium is not an issue for EVs per se, this is often misrepresented by climate denialists .
Lithium is one of the most common elements on Earth's crust (like 30 out out of 250 elements). There is something like several million tons of lithium per person on the planet, and a typical EV battery need 10-15kg.
Furthermore, the lithium is not destroyed in a battery. It is perfectly reasonable and economic to recycle and get nearly 100% of the lithium back again, so we don't need an endless supply.
What we do see is standard supply-demand economics. Before EVs we had plenty of lithium supply. With the rapid rise in EVs the supply could not meet demand until new mining operations were brought online . Now supply is high and many lore lithium deposits have been identified. For example it is estimated that a few deposits in Nevada will easily supply enough lithium ore for the entire US EV fleet and BESS requirements to go 100% renewable energy.
Oil will run out far before lithium is a constraint, in part because burning oil completely removes the resource but lithium batteries are 100% recyclable
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its a little sad Thorium reactors havent been more developed.
as i understand it Deuterium mining is one of the reasons to go to the moon, not just as a steping stone to other planets and new raw materials