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.

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

Not that I think fusion energy will save the day but I do feel if things went really south then the timeline for these fusion experiments could be pushed forward some. When I read about ITER and its current plan of producing its first plasma in 2034 and then a energy positive reaction in 2039 I wonder why it takes so long to complete each stage. There seems to be no sense of urgency to get it done.

Sometimes it takes a crisis to focus minds and resources. If really pinched then perhaps those timelines can be brought forward. Just think, vaccines normally take years if not a decade to reach mass use yet during Covid a vaccine was out within 12 months. When push comes to shove then things can progress faster than we think. Now I don't think fusion, even if the technology could be realised, would help. The argument I am trying to make is things can happen quicker if people are given the right incentives. At the moment there is no incentive to perfect fusion so it gets dragged out.

In a hypothetical world where we imagine fusion energy is mastered and is economical we would still face the same problem of growth. If anything I would say we would get a worse outcome than today as all the greater energy would do is allow us to deplete our resources even more completely than what is the case now.

There would be greater consumption of goods and services and this will lead to more pollution of the environment and all the issues of lowering water tables, soil erosion and destruction of natural habitats would be that much worse. We think American consumption is bad but imagine if the whole world was consuming at the same rate. For better or worse that is what fusion will deliver. Issue is the optimists don't look at the downsides, only the positives so all the associated destruction caused by fusion energy are not spoken or considered.