[ExI] Fusion breakthrough

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Wed, Dec 14, 2022 at 9:22 AM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> Right? You would think that people would be dancing in the streets,
> knowing that their children wouldn't have to fight to the death over
> the last barrel of oil, eat each other, or hold hands singing Kumbaya
> while the lights went out forever. This is huge. This gets Malthus off
> of our backs for the foreseeable future and moves us much closer to
> becoming a space-faring type I civilization. I literally cried when I
> heard about this.
>
> ### This is a nothingburger. Guys running the project needed to drum up
publicity before applying for more research grants, so they spew press
releases and the gullible journos amplify the funding call.

Fusion research is a waste of time and money, unless unexpected and strange
advances happen. All the projects are so many orders of magnitude away from
useful fusion conditions it's not even funny. The radioactive waste problem
is immense, much larger than with fission energy. The whole thing might
turn out to be impossible this side of the singularity.

More importantly, it's all useless because solar wind and battery (SWB) is
already destroying the economic incentive to produce energy in any other
way, fossil, fission or fusion, and the disparity in economic performance
will only grow as SWB further matures. SWB is already cheaper than coal and
to think that fusion could rival SWB economically is a pipe dream (again,
short of strange and unexpected discoveries in fusion research).

Just mine more lithium, tile the deserts with solar and don't pay attention
to doomsayers.

Rafal
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