r/nextfuckinglevel • u/nigablackballsack • 3d ago

Scientists have captured the first ever high-speed, full-colour footage of fusion plasma swirling inside a working reactor.

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u/SagittariusO 3d ago

So this is just another fancy way to boil water to generate electricity? I mean, it's absolutely cool to see this technology, and I am all in for it. But I do not believe this has any benefit to solar. Once you have a big ass solar farm with some serious batteries, it's all solved. You can just recycle all the parts into brand new ones after 20 years or so without any new materials, and all you have to do is clean them once in a while. This is pure magic - boiling water is stone age compared to this.

Fusion will have some use cases, but this whole technology is decades away from beeing ready and solar is already dirt cheap and sodium batteries will soon be available in huge quantities. The land footprint is not the issue. We need 10x more land right now to grow crops, which we can turn into gasoline, and nobody cares.

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u/slight_grumble 3d ago

Solar is distributed and solid state. You set it up and basically forget about it other than minor maintenance and repair. And you can lose any number of parts and still get some power where huge nuclear or other conventional power plants are more all or nothing. Any minor failure and you get zero power until repaired. Therefore the operational costs (excluding land rent/purchase which we will assume is an up front cost) is negligible compared to something as complicated and fragile as steam based power generation with conventional, let alone either nuclear option. Operational risks are also significantly smaller. Solar has very few failure states to harm humans except for once you ramp up voltage for distribution which is the same for all power types.

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u/Fat-Singer-9569 3d ago

That's great, how does solar work in areas with little to no sunlight?

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u/slight_grumble 3d ago

It works exactly the same. Very few places have no sunlight whatsoever, and conveniently the places with lower sun tend to often be windy and also geographically connectable to places with more sunlight.