it's taking more energy to power it than you're getting out of it. (You can build a fusion device on your garage if you're so inclined, though obviously this is much neater than that!)

One viewpoint is that we'll never get clean energy from these devices, not because they won't work, but because you get a lot of neutrons out of these devices. And what do we do with neutrons? We either bash them into lead and heat stuff up (boring and not a lot of energy), or we use them to breed fissile material, which is a lot more energetically favorable. So basically, the economically sound thing to do is to use your fusion reactor to power your relatively conventional fission reactor. Which is still way better than fossil fuels IMHO, so that's something.

[–] DaTingGoBrrr@lemm.ee 1 points 1 hour ago

Helion has an interesting take on fusion reactors that generate power using electro magnetism and Copenhagen Atomics are trying to create Thorium reactors. I hope they will work better than the boiling they use in tocamac reactors

[–] zurohki@aussie.zone 4 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

It seems like it's probably too late.

Even if we crack fusion power today, I can't see it being deployed cheaply enough and quickly enough to compete with solar/wind+batteries. By the time we could get production fusion plants up and ready to feed power into the grid, it'd be 2050 and nobody would be interested in buying electricity from it.

[–] monogram@feddit.nl 1 points 32 minutes ago

With what infrastructure are we even going to use all this electricity?

[–] Quadhammer@lemmy.world 4 points 6 hours ago

What I would like fusion to do is power space ships