this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2026
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Can someone quantify 'nearly limitless' for me? Like a ton of energy at any given moment, or just not running out of fuel? Could 1 of these power a factory on its own? A city? A country? The entire earth?
It's both access to abundant energy and far higher efficiency in producing energy. Fusion is more energy-dense and efficient than fission because it converts a larger fraction of its fuel's mass into energy. This comes down to the mass per nucleon curve which acts like an energy valley. In fission, heavy elements like uranium split into lighter ones, moving slightly downhill on the curve and converting about 0.1% of mass into energy. In fusion, light nuclei like hydrogen isotopes combine to form helium, which is much farther down the valley wall. This steeper drop allows fusion to convert up to 0.7% of mass into energy. So, gram for gram, fusion fuel can release roughly seven times more energy than fission fuel.
https://www.nsta.org/blog/focus-physics-how-e-mc2-helps-us-understand-nuclear-fission-and-fusion
Just not running out of fuel and not that limitless really. It's just another reactor boiling water. Likely scaled to 1.9GW for the biggest steam turbines and transmission infrastructure available today to be remotely economical. Would still be another painstaking massive civic engineering project, access to large bodies of water that isn't too hot because of climate change and alot more electricity inputs then starting a fission reaction.
Unless you are swindling venture capitalists. You need two fuels - deuterium and tritium. Deuterium is extremly ambudent and energy dense but tritium can only be produced in large quantities from lithium. David MacKay's "Lithium Fusion" feels like a more honest representation. That author's own estimate is 10KWh/d of sustainable energy per person. I hope somebody can challenge this because comparing it with 2008 consumption that's 1/6th of what the author estimates is required under best circumstances for improvements in efficiency that still have to be realised.
edit: kind of disingenuous of me when the figures improve from lithium sea mining. I just have a knee jerk reaction to pop science journalism. I also think it's sad we held out for a the holy grail of fusion or le thorium epic bacon molten salt reactors when the PWR was perfectly fine.
If they get the technique down they could replace a coal fired power plant with a fusion plant. Which would be cool.