Quote from: K-Dog on Aug 03, 2024, 07:20 PM

Quotesaid Aneeqa Khan, a research fellow in nuclear fusion at the University of Manchester. "Only if fusion power plants produce significant amounts of electricity later in the century will they help keep our carbon emissions down – and that will become crucial in the fight against climate change."

No, the added electricity will only make remaining fossil fuels be used faster.  Collapse is intensified with each delay.  You don't fight energy use by more energy use.  Without restrictions adding more of one kind will increase use of all kinds.

I don't care what a research fellow in nuclear fusion needs to think to get through his day.  If it helps him do his job, fine.  The effect of using fusion is beyond his bailiwick.  I give him his simple substitution.

Emphasis mine.

The flaw here is we would have to GET to the end of the century for this to even have a CHANCE.  We're talking 76 years.  Who thinks we stand ANY chance of getting to 2100 before we run short of the energy necessary to keep 8B+ homo sap Meat Packages fed?  We simply don't have that kind of time to mess around to make fusion work.  This is an engineering  bridge too far, it's been talked about and worked on for 50 years, and the best they can do is get a few seconds of net positive energy out of the contraption.  No way to harness that energy to produce electricity, no way yet to source the large quantity of Tritium needed for a commercial scale application, no long term testing of the hardware subject to bombardment by high energy particle beams daily 24/7...blah blah blah.  It's just not gonna happen in time.  Even if they had 76 years it probably can't be done.  In the mean time though it consumes a huge amount of resources to keep going with it.  Scientists who could be working on projects with some chance of success, money that could go to solving immediate pressing problems, andd gobs of energy toget the plasma hot enough and create strong enough magnetic fields to contain it.  How is the energy generated to do that?  You guessed it, FOSSIL FUELS!!!  The Lasers and Electromagnets all use Gigawatts worth of electricity to fire up one of these Tokamaks for a few seconds.  The energy it produces doesn't power it, it just is heat.  No turbines and conversion of the heat to work to drive turbines.  Basically, it's a very expensive Bonfire for theoretical physicists.  Burning energy and burning money for a pipe dream.  Total waste.

RE