Eh, fusion is two or three major construction projects away. We're very confident that ITER and DEMO will work. Of course funding has been abysmal, so they might be overtaken by projects that, for example, use better superconductors.

That being said, fusion will come too late to do something about climate change, so we should be building renewables as quickly as we can, and, if we have too much money, perhaps add a bit of nuclear.

Even if the experiments succeed that could still be a long way from a plant that is commercially viable.

Well, many people argue that _fission_ is not commercially viable without socializing at least some of the cost, and yet we're reading articles about new fission plants. If you think about it, fossil fuels aren't commercially viable either, a large part of the costs (global warming...) are socialized.

Coal, oil and Natural gas recieve 5.9 TRILLION dollars a YEAR according to the IMF. That's a lot of hydro, wind, wave, solar and nuclear power potential.

Fossil fuel companies are parasites.

The question with fusion I never see answered is: "How do we convert the heat to electricity?"

If the answer is steam then fusion is as dead as coal and nuclear. Or is there some solid state like solar or very non-complex working method like a wind turbine which is the target?

The answer is always steam turbines, because nothing else approaches the practical efficiency of steam turbines when it comes to converting heat to electrical power.

But that is the thing. Pure steam turbine based power have been dead since the 80's with the advent of the combined cycle gas turbine power plants. You get pure mechanical power from the gas turbine and then a tiny steam side to harness the last efficiency gains.

That cost difference is the reason coal has died out, it's simply not economical to run a large steam turbine.

I agree with you in general that it is unlikely that fusion will be cost competitive, but the last time I checked we still got a very large fraction of our power from coal, despite the steam.

Yes, there are financial structural reasons coal is still used. They amount to institutionalized sunk-cost fallacy. Those will take decades to root out.

Sorry to break it to you, but coal is still the largest electricity source with 36.7%. Over the last 20 years its output went from 5.8PW to 10PW (yes, that's petawatts). So, nowhere near "has died out".

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix

I should definitely have prefaced it with the caveat regarding availability of natural gas infrastructure. Gas is cheaper, when you have the infrastructure in place. Less developed countries does not have that luxury, and therefore choose coal because it was pretty much the only thing available until the current renewable boom.

Today we also have LNG, but that seems to mostly be about energy independence. Russia can't simply turn off the tap for Lithuania or Poland, because they have a more pricy alternative method of delivery.

For reference see the dramatic decrease of coal in the US in favor of natural gas.

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...

The pace of change in the last fifteen years has been nonlinear.

Let's not take it for granted, for sure, but let's maybe dial back on the "fusion is always 20 years away" jokes. There isn't a bigger win for civilization than fusion, leaving aside unknowns: immortality might be possible, fusion was our only source of energy until the discovery of fission.

There were no jokes, a comment said that "let's plan our energy generation assuming it doesn't materialize, we can always recalibrate if it does".

I hope you will allow people still being sceptical and cautious about counting on fusion for at least another 20-30 years.

The progress that the physicists and engineers made is tremendous and I appreciate everyone's sacrifices to make fusion a viable energy source.

However, it isn't one yet and likely it won't be for decades. There are still plenty of engineering challenges, and once those are solved, comes the economical, bureaucratical challenges (just take a look at how bad most countries are in building new fission reactors).

Both can be true at the same time.

I don't know about you, but I am planning my life with the assumption that the energy I use won't be coming from fusion for the rest of it (and I am around 30).

There's little downside in taking the pessimistic side of a bet with an enormous payout on the optimism side.

I'm on the optimism side of that coin though.

It's by no means necessary for a joke to have been made in the comment I was replying to, for me to refer to it. The cliché is well known.

Yeah but make sure to read the Voodoo Fusion article along the way.

https://vixra.org/pdf/1812.0382v1.pdf

Interesting how it excludes the most promising fusion start ups, especially Commonwealth Fusion Systems. What is the point of addressing the challenges fusion face when the best contenders are completely ignored? CFS are betting that the new breed of super conducting magnets(REBCO) will make fusion commercially viable. Beyond that, their reactor design is basically from the 50s. Tried and true design + modern materials = success?

See Prof. Dennis Whyte, one of the of cofounders of CFS explain why he believes that fusion is coming sooner than you might think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4

Do they have any fusion neutrons or a power conversion plant yet? Don't think so.

Immortality with our meat based brains has so much working against it, it might as well be impossible.

It was a pretty load-bearing "might", agreed.