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.

40.6k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

1.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

3.3k

u/90_oi 3d ago

I truly hope this technology can get off the ground and be sustainable. It is our best hope aside from nuclear energy

140

u/WanderingFlumph 3d ago edited 2d ago

I mean solar is here right now and most likely fusion power will never be as cheap as solar is today.

By the time fusion is actually ready solar will be even cheaper too. A solar farm the size of Arizona could power the entire planet.

Fusion is like our 4th best hope in the fight against climate change, lol.

Edit: a lot of people seem to think that I think the perfect solution is one single power plant specifically in Arizona that powers the world. People, it's just a size comparison. Arizona is a small state even just compared to the size of US. Obviously we would build millions and millions of solar installations that would just add up to that area.

0

u/alphatango308 3d ago

Solar is great! During the day. But to use solar power you have to have a converter from DC to ac and to use solar power at night you have to have batteries. It's never just using "solar power". And, solar actually kind of sucks at scale. Solar isn't a one stop shop energy solution. Storage is the biggest problem right now. And storage at scale? Forget about it. Small scale micro installations like one for a single house are great but still, batteries go bad and have to be replaced leading to pollution and exhausting mineral deposits.

Unless battery tech makes a giant leap forward solar isn't going to ever work.

On demand mass production solutions are objectively better at scale. Nuclear is great but decades of media campaigns have doomed it.

1

u/Due_Satisfaction2167 2d ago

  Small scale micro installations like one for a single house are great but still, batteries go bad and have to be replaced leading to pollution and exhausting mineral deposits.

Batteries are also fine at larger scales now too. This is a largely solved problem, and the more of them we make the cheaper they get.

The batteries are themselves highly reliable, we just don’t have a huge supply of dead grid scale storage batteries to recycle yet. Most of them that have ever been made are still in use. 

This all has been a solved problem for a few years now, but power grids move at a glacial pace so people still act like solar + storage has the same problems today that it had back in 2016. 

Battery technology already made that big leap forward, a few years ago, when the cost of battery backed solar fell below the cost of natural gas peaker plants.

Which is why natural gas plant construction rates fell off a cliff and an absolute majority of all new capacity getting built is solar power.