Fusion will likely happen in this century. Fission is a great temporary power source to get us there alongside renewables.
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Renewable sources of energy, such as solar and wind power suffer from “intermittency”, meaning they do not consistently produce energy at all hours of the day.
If only we had some way of storing energy for use later. Oh well.
We do not currently have the battery tech to have a fully renewables-powered grid where batteries are used for the regular dips in production wind and solar have.
We likely won't have infrastructure like that in place for decades.
Do you know what they do in Norway with out-of-use old mines? They lift a load when there's energy to be stored. They lower it when there's energy to be spent. I'm sure you know how electric engines work and that the conversion is symmetric.
No battery tech involved.
Battery tech is in general mostly relevant for autonomous devices we carry, for airplanes and ships, for cars.
For the central grid the ways to store energy are almost inifinite.
In situations where that's feasible, it's good. But it's far from feasible all the time.
You certainly couldn't replace all existing fossil fuels with it, or even scratch the surface really.
Norway can do stuff like this because they have the geography for it, as well as a population that's like a 15th of the UK or a 60th of the US. They don't actually need much energy.
Can you back this up with links to reputable sources?
Can you back up your original claim - that we can sufficiently power all of our grids with current batteries, and that current battery manufacturing is enough to do so?
With reputable sources.
That’s not how this works. You made a tall claim, without sources. Now it seems you’re not willing to provide proof to substantiate it. Why?
You made a tall claim, and still haven't substantiated it. Why?
Show me this proof that we have the batteries to eliminate all fossil fuels.
You know that's how it works, right? You make a claim, you need evidence to support it...
This you?
We do not currently have the battery tech to have a fully renewables-powered grid where batteries are used for the regular dips in production wind and solar have.
We likely won’t have infrastructure like that in place for decades.
Put up or shut up.
The real solution is the thing that the fossil fuel companies have been buying up the tech for and burying it for decades...batteries.
So maybe they will invest to get it further. It's not a 9 women can make a baby in a month .. but sufficient funding for next gen nuclear and fusion will help progress.
Maybe AI can help us break the fusion hurdles. Oh. It's still telling people to eat rocks, just used to create waifu porn and as a mass spy application? Nothing else, really? Well shit.
I know you're being reflexively downvoted by who hate everything AI, but this is the sort of thing AI should be most useful for, which is finding patterns within large problem spaces with many variables.
It's even bad at porn. Very limited means of describing the process, forgetting that there are no bed sheets in a park, same repeating metaphors. Boring.
Nothing else? Please do not speak for other people if you can not grasp what others do with this tool.
Sorry, I didn't mean to leave out the bestiality porn creation as well. That was unintentional on my part.
I think people still don't understand what the problem is with fusion. The problem is not that it doesn't work, it will work, and soon. The problem is that everyone seems to think fusion means cheap limitless energy, and that couldn't be further from the truth. When fusion does finally work, it will be the most expensive form of energy available. That's going to be a gamebreaker, right out of the gate.
So far, the only method we know of to guarantee that your reactor will be energy positive is to make it truly enormous. Let me tell you, going truly enormous is not a good way to keep costs down. But let's say you just spent 8 years building a cutting edge fusion power plant and you want it to work smoothly. Well you better hire a large team of nuclear physics PHDs to keep that reactor working, they must be a dime a dozen, right? You'll need them for all the maintenance of your cutting edge reactor, get ready for those maintenance costs to mount up. And be prepared to continue paying for all your staff and facilities even while the reactor is (frequently) power down for maintenance.
Also, you do have an economical way to dispose of nuclear waste right? Because fusion reactors are probably going to generate a significant amount of nuclear waste... That's one of the side effects of actually turning the high energy particles released by the reactor into heat. Those free protons and neutrons get absorbed by a physical shield around the reactor called the blanket. That blanket becomes radioactive over time and needs to be replaced. Congratulations, your clean fusion energy is now producing radioactive waste, and your back to the exact same problems we have with fission.
My advice, keep using the nuclear energy we understand really well at this point, fission. Also, renewables and storage are already a cheaper solution to do exactly the same thing fusion will eventually do. I'm certain that fusion will be a fantastic technology for large spacecraft someday, but I make no promises it will ever become the first choice for general terrestrial power generation.
Fusion. What they’re missing is fusion powe