I’m always hoping fusion will do a major leap… I’ve been waiting for a while… but you’re right, there are niches, like places where nothing grows, where water is in short supply, etc.

[–] realChem@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Fusion is very hard. There's been some intriguing progress and I do believe we'll get there – and maybe sooner than many think – but to have a real effect on the climate change timeline I think we'd need to be just about finished with the experimental phase now (if not several years ago) and moving into widespread scale-up. That's just not realistic at this point, unfortunately. So while promising in the long view, I wouldn't bet on it solving any of our near-term problems.

(Edit: and that's ignoring the practical issues of sourcing the required amounts of deuterium / tritium and beryllium, which would rapidly exceed the entire world output under any kind of real scale-up)

[–] khalic@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

Ugh don’t make me think about the tritium issue… I think we’ll get there too, but it should have been yesterday as you said…

Well at least we got voice controlled lights before the end of the world, that’s something… /s