In light of climate change I lean towards it being positive but I’m not very informed on this.
Good in theory, but with many cons:
- Very costly and construction can take ages. The shortest afaik is about 10 years in South Korea. Increasing demands to safety and aditional capabilities drive costs and complexity even more.
- Costs per kW/h is generally way higher.
- Renewables in comparison can be installed way faster and more flexible.
- Technology is generally extremely expensive and unattainable for poorer countries, giving advanced/rich nations another lead in development.
- Uranium is kinda like coal, in the sense that it is non-regenerative and can be controlled by capital way more easily than decentralized renewable sources.
- Nuclear waste is nasty stuff and disposal/storage is usually highly controversal. Almost no politician wants to deal with it.
My ideal scenario would be:
- Massive increase of renewables, storage and general energy efficiency.
- Massive decrease fossil fuel energy via stringent regulation and divestment.
- More ressources for fusion research as the next step of energy production for baseload power plants. (Keep some smaller renewable sources online though)
Fusion to me is a mistake. It’s like hydrogen fuel cells. It’s a pipe dream that sucks money, resources, and development away from batteries and other technologies that are feasible.
Fusion is 15-20 years away and always will be.
A friend of mine works here: https://www.iter.org/
Fusion is very viable, you just need to have the infrastructure to start and sustain a much hotter reactor core than fission.
Maybe fusion will work. 5 more years to start testing test the first large scale reactor. 5 years minimum for more testing. Then say every country starts building right away, that’s another 10-15 years.
And that’s assuming everything goes smoothly and the designs work properly on the newly scaled up reactor.
Maybe fusion is the thing to save the world - but my perspective is our battle with climate change can’t wait another 20 years without phasing out fossil fuels, and we have tech now (solar, nuclear) that’s capable of replacing fossil fuels.
you just need to have the infrastructure to start and sustain a much hotter reactor core than fission.
Isn’t that precisely what makes fusion not viable?
