The U.S. and China are in a high-tech race to achieve and commercialize an elusive clean energy source: nuclear fusion. Fusion has the potential to create ne...
The Holy Grail of energy needs to be so many things. A non exhaustive list:
Clean/low environmental impact
Cheap
Fast to build
Reliable output and able to load-follow
Universally applicable (geography)
Safe
Large scale
Solar and wind don’t tick all of these boxes, but neither do fission, fusion, hydroelectric, geothermal, or any other source. That’s why we’re in this predicament.
The thing about fusion is it doesn’t actually bring anything new to the table. It’s supposed to be fission but without any radioactive waste, but this isn’t actually true. The beryllium cladding in the core of the tokamak (Chinese reactors use this design iirc) becomes irradiated, and when replaced produces a volume of low-level waste far higher than a fission reactor does through its normal operation. And it’s going to be way more expensive simply by virtue of being novel to boot.
The Holy Grail of energy needs to be so many things. A non exhaustive list:
Solar and wind don’t tick all of these boxes, but neither do fission, fusion, hydroelectric, geothermal, or any other source. That’s why we’re in this predicament.
The thing about fusion is it doesn’t actually bring anything new to the table. It’s supposed to be fission but without any radioactive waste, but this isn’t actually true. The beryllium cladding in the core of the tokamak (Chinese reactors use this design iirc) becomes irradiated, and when replaced produces a volume of low-level waste far higher than a fission reactor does through its normal operation. And it’s going to be way more expensive simply by virtue of being novel to boot.