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this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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Reducing carbon emissions isn’t the primary goal here though. The primary goal is infinite clean energy. INFINITE power. The plant in France could become operational within 5 years. The harnessing of this power is a milestone for our species.
fusion won't give us infinite power. It requires tritium last I knew.
What's the bottleneck there? Is there a reason why we couldn't scale up production? Genuinely asking.
It costs energy to make. Im not sure really if its net positive overall but its enough that the moon is talked about for its tritium deposits which makes me think its not very easy to make. wikipedia has some stuff on it but its hard to get overall. Anyway though its not some magical unlimited energy. it has inputs and outputs like anything else.
Of course, yeah. I think we would see nearly unlimited, free energy, but there's obviously still bounds and constraints. I think it could very well be enough energy to be considered limitless for everyday activities and industry, and only run into issues with things like space travel. But we'll have to see. It's such a new field in terms of actually having things to show for, there's a lot we don't know.
Im very skeptical it would get anywhere near that. Besides tritium I know the reactors need certain shielding that gets worn out and becomes radioactive. tritium can be made from fission plants and fusion makes radioactive elements but given everything else we have seen with technology I am doubting these are going to play off each other in a net positive way that can just be kept on going. Its in some ways a lot like wind/solar/water. The sunlight/wind/maybetidal is unlimited but the materials for the collectors are not and have to be replaced. We are really good at using up energy sources and there are like 8 billion of us.
From what I understand tritium is the easiest but there are other ways to acheive fusion. Once we figure out deuterium-tritium fusion we should be able to work towards something like deuterium-deuterium fusion. You also have methods that can be used to manufacture tritium. One of the later stages of the ITER project is to attempt to use the reactor to breed tritium. If they can pull that off then there would be no need for external sources of tritium.
I mean even given that there are other resources that go into it. Fusion will give us more time but its not going to allow super inefficient things like sucking the carbon back out. I don't have great hope because given we squandered the last 50 years I doubt more time will help us. All the same though its better to have it than not have it.