Why fusion power will NEVER be feasible...

[brianmanahan]

Dude, you're weird af. Done here.

he tries way too hard and is incapable of carrying on an intelligent conversation

 

[Paratus]

There's a number of small scale fusion experiments going on currently. They gave benefit of trying new designs quickly.

The article in Scientific American I read (behind a paywall) says some of these startups have built and tested designs in about year. They then take what they learned and roll it into the next upgraded reactor design. The hope is they quickly learn how to overcome the each issue quickly for about 1% of what ITER costs.

If you are an optimist they could have a fusion reactor breaking even in 5 years. If you are a pessimist they've taken fusion from always being 20 years away to only always being 5 years away.

(Oh and we already have a set of large space based solar arrays technically beaming microwave energy (KU-Band) to the ground in the ISS. Don't get your hopes up to scale this just yet.)

 

[Red Squirrel]

The problem with any system that would beam energy down is that the amount of energy that would be viable would also be lethal if anything got in the path of the beam. Suppose you could have it geostationary so the beam never changes and you just have a huge exclusion zone where the beam comes down, but still have to consider the environmental effects.

The biggest thing needed for energy is not so much renewable sources - we have that: solar, wind, etc. What we need is better storage. If we came up with something with the same energy density as fuel or even higher it would make solar and wind very viable as you could store tons of excess in peak times then sip it on non peak times.

Though the biggest burden is not even technology it's politics. Even with existing tech it is viable in a lot of places to go full solar but the politics won't allow it. Heck in lot of places it's actually illegal to go off grid.

 

[sandorski]

Thanks for saving our time and $ OP!

 

[sourceninja]

...

 

[clamum]

Errrr, you might have well have said, "Don't be so sure - don't underestimate the ingenuity and the drive of humans to create energy out of nothing!". Becuase that's how silly that statement is...

Mmmm hmmm. I believe in a bunch of smart humans working on the project (nothing about it is theoretically impossible; otherwise all these countries wouldn't be pooling time and money into ITER) over some troll dipshit on the Internet.