"Can _insert technology we don't have yet and that requires breakthrough_ save use"

Yeah sure, why not

Nuclear is already the answer but people are afraid and even countries lead by "smart people" such as Germany are slowly decommissioning their nuclear power plants...

In the meantime we're using more and more energy while putting all our eggs in the "intermittent energy sources" basket. It might have been fine if we all lived like 1960s era people but I don't see how that would work in today's world

I used to be so excited about fusion, but then I actually learned more about it. Perhaps I'm missing something, but the benefits over fission seem underwhelming.

It's about the same cost on a per-megawatt basis. Modern fission plants are totally safe. Nuclear waste is basically a non-problem, especially with the most recent technology.

And fission has the huge benefit of being a mature, proven technology.

What's the big benefit of fusion that makes it worth investing so much money?

The only thing I can see is that it doesn't require uranium, which can be abused to make weapons. But does that by itself justify the investment?

Assuming there are multiple breakthroughs on the research, design, and scale-up phase, fusion will only help us in a couple decades, put on the brakes is a 2020/2030s task. Putting on the brakes means slowing down, which means decarbonizing power, transport, industry, and agriculture, amongst other things. We don't need fusion to do that, we need to transform our current system. Fusion could be nice as a future-fuel, perhaps it could power carbon sequestration efforts. But unless we put on the brakes NOW with what we have, this car is going to crash.

Best time to invest into fusion research was 50 years ago. Second best time is now.

Nuclear fission is one of a few (if not the only) viable ways to have significant positive impact on climate change short-term (20 years).

Small rant on nuclear waste. I don't think it's a problem. I think it's a solution to fuel future generations of reactors (50+ years). I'd go as far as assume that e.g. Finland could import nuclear waste and store it in that new state-of-the-art nuclear waste repository. They would make money now to store the waste, and then make money eventually when tech is there to reuse it and generate power.

No. The car will still be running even if we fully stop right now. There is an excess of carbon in the atmosphere, there are feedback loops that are emitting carbon due to the already existing warming, you don't shutdown the greenhouse effect with just a halt or slowdown of emissions because what is already there will keep doing its job.

What you can do switching to nuclear (in some industries, at least) is to not increase as much as previous years what we add to the problem.

It's not stopping, nor slowing down or keeping the current speed, but just accelerating a bit less than before.

Massive carbon capture is needed (orders above the gigantic amount that is added each year, because you need to take out the carbon emitted in the previous years too, and there is the feedback loops playing too), along with bringing new emissions sharply down. And all of that at least for many years after reaching below preindustrial carbon levels (global temperature should drop enough to turn off the positive feedback loops).

Nuclear fission is good enough, available right now, causes much fewer deaths than the alternatives, does not pollute the atmosphere, and accidents are extremely rare and nowhere near as dangerous as they've been portrayed. To wit, Fukushima: 1 dead from the nuclear accident, compared to 10000 from the tsunami.

Probably not. ITER takes 440 megawatts of total power to generate 500 megawatts of power, at the cost of many years of development & billions of dollars. [1]

[1] http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/10/how-close-is-nuclea...

Nuclear fission can

In a fission reactor, I know the energy goes into the water, which creates steam and that turns a turbine. But it looks like fusion reactors use a near vacuum and high powered magnets. Once two atoms actually fuse, where does that energy "go"? Does the new helium atom just bounce around the containment unit? How do we actually extract meaningful energy from such a closed system?

Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER for visuals.

This article asks the wrong question.

"Can Nuclear fusion bail out our ship before it sinks?" No.

"Can Nuclear Fusion help us re-float our ship after its sunk?" Maybe.

Can captured space alien technology based on element 115 help solve climate change? It's about as likely to generate real commercially usable amounts of power in the next decade.

At this point, we don't have new fission plants being built, and we're converting all the coal plants to run on natural gas, which is just going to jack up the prices for consumers who use it for heat.

The time to fix this was 5 decades ago.

When a headline asks a question, the answer is almost always “no”.

If you're interested in fusion power check out Robert Bussard's tech talk on his design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhL5VO2NStU

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell

The claims on nuclear fission being just around the corner are wildly exaggerated. Sabine Hossenfelder has a great video [1] on this topic. I want fusion to be real too, but focussing on small scale fission and solar is probably a better idea.

[1] - https://youtu.be/LJ4W1g-6JiY

No. Almost all electricity that we generate will eventually turn into heat and get released into the atmosphere.

Even if nuclear had 0 environmental impact during production, which is absolutely not the case, we still must cool down the planet.

We need energy sources that work by CAPTURING energy that otherwise would be turned into atmospheric heat.

SPARC is going to be relatively small in size. If they can make the commercial reactors as small as SPARC then they can be created in a factory. Which will make roll out and cost much better than fission.

No, Fusion can not put the brakes on climate change. It is the best long term option for generating heat, but the problem is not about what we add, but instead about what we remove.

Carbon Capture is what will matter. Carbon taxes are an interesting attempt at political solutions, but this requires coordination between Russia, CCP, and the USA. We need something that can be done despite what other foreign powers can be made to do, lest we want to wage WW3 over this.

Carbon Capture is also proportionately underfunded compared to renewables. Global warming is not something that will stop when we stop being bad; it has momentum. Greenhouse gases are like a blanket we’ve been wrapping around ourselves. We have to unwrap to get back to normal: carbon capture.

I hate things like this.

Climate change is an emergency, one that we're far behind on tackling. Talking about future technologies that are many decades away (if ever) is the opposite of helpful.

Imagine in 1943 the headline:

"Can hypersonic missiles put the brakes on Hitler's Army?"

Why would any government or international organization want to put the brakes on Climate change if it is the single biggest reason to increase their power? Do people think it's coincidental that the people who shriek loudest about climate change also shriek loudest about nuclear? And the thing is, I know whoever wrote this drivel for the new yorker knows better.