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243 points greesil | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.204s | source
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apples_oranges ◴[] No.44636362[source]
Looking at the picture, I wonder if complexity of these devices will significantly be reduced once it finally works. I assume a lot of the bells and whistles are needed to find the way, but once it's found..
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empath75 ◴[] No.44637055[source]
The real problem with fusion power is that even if they figure it out, it still won't be cost competitive with solar and wind.

Economically all the cost of building a "boil some water and turn some turbines" plant is _already_ in the "boiling some water and turning some turbines" part of the generation, and even if the heat part of it was _free_, the rest of it would be too expensive to bother building a plant for it, compared to just building solar and wind generation and some better batteries.

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1. ericd ◴[] No.44637428[source]
True if you look at the cost to build the plant, but it’s hard to colocate enough solar with heavy users, land near there is expensive, and transmission capacity is pretty hard to get built, so something very power dense with a small footprint is helpful. I haven’t dug into the numbers, so I could very well be wrong that it pencils out when you consider those.

And there are efforts to make building out transmission and interconnecting with the grid more streamlined, so maybe some of those problems will be gone by the time fusion’s ready.

Someone said recently that it’s nicer to have bad laws and good tech than a bad tech and good laws, solar+storage seems like it’s in the former now, and if we can clear the bureaucratic hurdles, we’ll see it boom here like we’ve seen elsewhere.