Moving from fission to fusion is the Holy Grail of nuclear energy

[Retrasado]

mrstickball said:

Soleron said:

gurglesletch said:

 

What's wrong with that? That's how the world is now and we are all fine.

Are you serious?

Even if you don't believe climate change exists, you must know fossil fuels are non-renewable and will run out soon.

Define 'soon'.

at current rates of consumption and reasonable projects of growth, most estimates put reserves of oil that is easily obtainable using current tech (by this I mean ~$3-$4/gallon to the consumer) as lasting about 15-20 years at the absolute extreme longest possibilty though advances in tech will probably extend this for at least a few more decades, especially if we can figure out how to get more oil from oil shale like the massive deposits in Western Canada. (if you read books about this from from the 70s, they all say oil will run out by the mid-1990s, so obviously its not an easy thing to answer)

Natural gas will probably last 80-100 years although this figure depends largely on how long the oil reserves hold up it is by far the easiest fuel to convert exisiting engines to burn. Coal should easily last 250-300 years or maybe even more so that's probably not an issue.

The main problem with fossil fuels is even if we don't run out of them in the near future or even for 100 years or so, they are going to and will keep getting harder and harder to obtain and this will increase at an exponential rate as the percentage of people living in developed countries continues to skyrocket. This means that the increasingly few countries that do have significant reserves of fossil fuels will see their power and influence increase quite rapidly. Although it is obvious that Canada will not be retarded about this and most likely Russia won't either, many countries will definitely use this to their advantage and they will increasingly hold the rest of the world in a quasi-hostage position. This is clearly not a good situation, regardless of who is holding the good end of the rope. I mean, why do you think Japan wanted to take over East Asia in WWII? And that was despite the fact that they were dependent on two very stable countries for their fuel: the US didn't give a damn as long as they paid us a fair price and the UK didn't care what the hell happened as long as the Japanese paid them and stayed away from India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, etc.

Nuclear fusion avoids all these problems because any country that has access to an ocean has an effectively limitless fuel supply and you can only stop them from accessing this by blatently invading them and siezing their territory. (Also, their are only about 35 countries that are completely landlocked) Nuclear fusion is also much more efficient than any other even theorectial means of power generation other than a matter-antimatter annihilation reactor (which is clearly far beyond anything our current technology can build). This means you could easily generate enough power for a large US state or a European country with less than 10 power plants. In addition, regardless of your opinion on climate change, it is fairly obvious that reducing pollution is a good thing and nuclear fusion would really help in this area.