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Ehldas t1_j6mnc4h wrote

Reply to comment by Earthling7228320321 in Major milestone for EU energy: Wind and solar produced more electricity than gas in 2022 by Zomaarwat

Fusion is not a "near future" option.

Research is going extremely well, and it's basically down to engineering rather than physics problems now as no-one in the industry really doubts that it will be a viable form of energy generation. But it's still 10-15 years away from even having a viable fusion reactor design, and then a huge amount more from being a dominant source of energy.

So we need to need to be concentrating on the solutions we have now (renewables, existing reactor designs, SMRs, etc.) to solve the problems for the next 20-30 years.

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jert3 t1_j6nc5s2 wrote

Fusion power has been 10-15 years away for at least 50 years now.

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Ehldas t1_j6ndxbd wrote

Well, yeah, but then again we've never before been a decade away from an actual, real Q10+ fusion reactor, even if it's not intended to be a commercial one, and now we are.

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Earthling7228320321 t1_j6mtyrs wrote

That's my point. It's not, but it could be.

And physics is still very much of concern here. Engineering solutions are great but at the end of the day we need a better fundamental understanding of particle behavior if we are to make it sustainable. Right now no amount of engineering alone is going to overcome the problem of neutrons rapidly destroying equipment when they start pouring out of the fusion reaction.

However difficult these problems are, if the world wasn't stuck in a status quo of exploitation and war posturing, it would certainly make the job easier.

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Ehldas t1_j6mut8f wrote

>Right now no amount of engineering alone is going to overcome the problem of neutrons rapidly destroying equipment when they start pouring out of the fusion reaction.

Really? You should tell that to the engineers who invented the FLiBe blanket, specifically designed to capture the neutrons "flooding out" and turn them into useful tritium to feed back into the fusion cycle, while also protecting the rest of the fusion reactor vessel.

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Earthling7228320321 t1_j6n17bz wrote

So then why are they still a problem?

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Ehldas t1_j6n3rrg wrote

I didn't say neutrons were a specific problem : you did.

There are plenty of other engineering problems, including long duration high-temperature divertors, tungsten chemistries for wall endurance, new magnet chemistries of higher power and smaller size, computing designs to continue optimising plasma flow control especially at edges, and overall reactor design for ease of construction, maintenance, etc.

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Earthling7228320321 t1_j6n6yss wrote

My point was that we'd solve these problems a lot faster if worked on getting along. But I realize that's just a pipe dream so this whole convo is kinda rooted in pointlessness. I wasn't really arguing about the specifics.

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