Nuclear fusion on brink of being realised, say MIT scientists

Re:Nuclear fusion on brink of being realised, say MIT scient... by alex_duf on Friday March 09, 2018 @04:28AM (#16550649)

I'm sure it would be useful to have that technology around and I'm quite excited by the prospect of it, especially as the volume seems to be drastically reduced compared to ITER.

But I'm wondering how relevant fusion is to reverse climate change. It seems like renewables and storage are already fitting the bill, at a much lower cost.

Edit: happy to hear any arguments

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Nuclear fusion on brink of being realised, say MIT scient... by DennisP on Saturday March 10, 2018 @11:20AM (#16559020)

Renewables are cheap when backed up by natural gas plants, but wouldn't be especially cheap if you built enough storage to run civilization on them.

I certainly think we should build renewables as fast as we can, because they're available now and a long way from the market share that requires a lot of expensive storage. But down the road, it's entirely possible that advanced nuclear power sources, whether fusion or advanced fission like MSRs, will be more economical than building enormous amounts of battery storage. (We do have cheap hydro storage but that's geographically limited.)

[ Parent | on HN ]