technology

((God fusion access as a pillar of belt and road. Fusion-Powered Iran. Fusion powered Vietnam. Fusion powered Burkina-faso. Your new 1st-2nd world is countries with fusion and countries without it and the one controlling that isn’t the US lmao. I’m lathing it.))

I think it's a fool's game to say that better technology isn't better. If you're getting a knee replaced and it's an outpatient procedure you do in an afternoon that's a really cool and good thing.

The discussion had by learned people regarding climate change, to my understanding, is that we've crossed over the event horizon for catastrophic damage from climate change. It's in a similar vein to pollution in the ocean and the like. Something to the effect of suggesting if we had 0 emissions from today onward we'd still experience repercussions. I don't have a good citation nor the will to seek one out, unfortunately

So it's not like easily built housing, renewable energy powered technology, and easily grown food to sustain climate refugees while an effort is made to un-desert their home is a bad thing or an unworthy goal. I have a sneaking suspicion that "technology will save us" is a way of misunderstanding the situation the same way someone might think you're perfect to date if only you weren't a communist. I doubt every climate scientist is a Luddite. But they'd probably groan if you suggest carbon capture will reset the clock like it's a novel idea.

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Limited in the sense that many hundreds of thousands of years are limited

The current title of the video, which says "could power the entire planet," is better if it's accurate.

It's not. It just heats up some water like any old coal power plant. In theory. In practice, fusion just consumes enormous amounts of energy.

the western hegemony

Xi, overseeing the country producing essentially all lithium batteries and solar panels in the planet: "what the fuck do you think I'm doing mate"

So you've heard about fusion before, but it was a while ago, maybe even years ago and now you'd like an update about where the research is at. Are we any closer to commercialization? That's the good news: you don't need an update because of the "fusion constant".

If asked, how close we are, scientists have given roughly the same answer for generations. Fusion never gets any closer. The answer is always "about 40 years". And that's been the case for about 70 years.

Probably unsolvable problems in principle include: plasma contamination from interaction with the first wall, plasma control and turbulence (magnetohydrodynamics are even harder than the famously unsolved Navier-Stokes equation), finding a reason why to even do it (renewables and batteries get better and cheaper every day, fusion will never be cheap and able to compete).

Might not solve the climate crisis (unless they are on an imminent breakthrough) but it does solve problems humans have had for thousands of years, research on it is very worth it

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.