Chris Wright: nuclear fusion will soon power the world
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqlz5p314z0o
Chris Wright: nuclear fusion will soon power the world
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqlz5p314z0o
25 Comments
From the article
Don’t worry too much about planet-warming emissions, the US Energy Secretary has told the BBC, because within five years AI will have enabled the harnessing of nuclear fusion – the energy that powers the sun and stars.
Chris Wright told me in an interview that he expected the technology to deliver power to electricity grids around the world within eight to 15 years and that it would rapidly become a big driver of greenhouse gas reductions.
His claims will likely surprise even enthusiasts for the technology.
Harnessing the energy released when atoms fuse together could produce vast amounts of low carbon energy but most scientists believe commercial fusion power plants are still a long way off.
The fact that Chris Wright is saying it makes me doubt it even more. Fusion has made progress recently, but it is still far away and here he is just using literal pie-in-the-sky to justify doing nothing about today’s carbon emissions.
Honestly, BBC, you guys should know better than to sanewash these guys.
I hope he’s right but I’ll wait and see.
A post like this kind of brings back the nostalgia of this sub from back in its heyday. Everybody was talking about how AI would solve everything, including aging and energy.
Im not an AI bad Bible thumper like most redditours, but if your reason for a 5 year massive change in energy generation is AI you sound big dum today.
Nuclear fusion is the power source of the future, and it always will be.
Seriously though, we’ve been doing nuclear fusion for over half a century, but we can’t find any practical way to make a power plant from it. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. When they do nuclear fusion, they usually do just a very small reaction in a closed space and that’s it. To do a sustained reaction and capture the energy from it in a way that’s economically viable is a monumental task.
So far all the net positive experiments have relied on them creating a very specific situation that would not be economical at any scale. For example having just the right amount of tritium mixed with just the right amount of deuterium and some very specific situations to get the reaction.
It’s far from impossible. But the phenomenal effort that thousands of scientists have put into solving this problem for so many decades has made it seem like it’s not something we’re going to see.
A great comparison would be in the world of bioengineering the holy grail is to modify a food crop to also host nitrogen cleaving bacteria (like clover).
Fusion would be great, too bad China is going to get it first because we have idiots running things here. China knows how to actually invest in things.
Nuclear fusion will eventually power the world and that means we are going to be paying china for our electricity.
This will become the next bubble after the AI one collapses. The quest for Fusion Supremacy will power the earning of the next generation of grifters and hucksters long after LLMs have become commodified.
Yup, we’re on the doorstep. Anyone who’s been paying attention and not going “hur dur fusion is 30 years away” knows it’s an engineering problem now, not a scientific one. We know we’ll need to breed tritium, we know we’ll need to deal with fast neutrons, we know we’ll be able to breed He3 eventually and not worry about mining it from the moon. 2030 will be the first pilot plant if not sooner.
“Please keep burning gas, which I personally profit from, while we wait on an unproven technology.”
Even if this were to be true we will still have to deal with an atmosphere with CO2 concentrations above 400 ppm, which will continue to warm the planet for centuries.
This is just to get people to stop pushing against petroleum and installing green energy. He is either lying, and deluded. So, par for the course for him.
Chris you’re an uninformed idiot. There will still be additional warming for the next 25yrs at least, due to the soup of chemicals we’ve pumped our atmosphere full of, even if every single power source in earth was switched to a non polluting renewable one today, right now
With Trump and Putin yes, we might have more fusion we ever wanted.
Even if we invented an unlimited energy source, corpos would still find a way to make it more expensive and gouge us for it.
“within five years AI will have enabled the harnessing of nuclear fusion”
I will admit that, had we been in the same physical space when he declared this, I would have punched him in the face.
Solar – owned by individual citizens. Wind – owned by small companies. Fusion- owned by the same large Corporations with billionaire CEOs that are causing all the problems today.
The right chiming in to call fusion power ‘woke’ in 3…2…1…
Chris Wright: “Fusion power is just another 50 years away! That means in the meantime we need to ban renewable energy and funnel tax dollars to the oil interests I still work for.”
Fusion is what we need for the future. And by future I mean when we have orbital settlements preparing for trips to Jupiter. I’m glad the science is being done but ffs let’s stop with the “it’s gonna power rhe grid” bs
We haven’t even achieved stable, lasting fusion yet. Powering the world soon is a pipedream even if were achieved tomorrow we’d still have to overhaul all the old infrastructure & build more plants, which would take years.
..for the last 20 or so years of our advanced civilization.
And ai will power my toilet soon,no more need to turn around and push the button to flush,i can just pay a subscription to have it auto flush it for me!
The times we live in…
Well, not America. We’re apparently sticking to fossil fuel.
That would be so wonderful! Just a couple of tiny problems:
First of all, fusion has yet to deliver more energy then that required to power ***all*** the equipment. I emphasize ***all*** because several report over the last few years have claimed that they have achieved net power output. But his is misleading, because the only input power included in this claim was for the lasers. It did **not** include the ancillary equipment. When that is included, we are still at a point where it takes nearly 10x energy input to get 1x energy output.
A second problem is that many (but not all) of the fusion experiments rely on deuterium and tritium. While the first is abundant in nature, tritium is extremely rare. So, part of the reaction attempts to produce more tritium, and this detracts from the overall output.
Those fusion reactions that do not rely on tritium have a significantly lower power output, so they are even farther away from break-even.
They’ve literally been saying this since before I was born. 35 years later and we’re much closer, but I won’t even consider this technology viable unless we can keep the reaction going for more than a day.