Quote:
Originally Posted by edslunch
The switching costs from a hydrocarbon economy to a fusion economy will be massive. Someone needs to build all those reactors, vehicle recharging stations, replace the world's entire fleet of hydrocarbon-based transportation. In other words it's a huge opportunity that will generate a large amount of economic activity. But you're right, those benefits will be at the expense of economies that depend on oil.
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Fusion would be great and likely will but it's hard to build all those reactors when there isn't a viable fusion system even on a small scale at this time. It's only been in the last year or so where any experiments have shown a net increase in energy (and I think it is only one group in a US national lab who used lasers....in a multi-billion dollar facility). And it hasn't been much. And that is only a start. To actually make the fuel and what not is not trivial. Fusion has a long, long ways to go.
There is ITER but if you talk to people involved in that project on an honest one-to-one level you'll get the impression that the very real chance exists that it will be a colossal failure and embarrassment to the community. Well fail even harder than it has so far. It is perhaps the worst fusion system to go forward with in the first place and the billions on billions of dollars that is likely to be wasted (continue to be wasted) is going to have a serious back lash.