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243 points greesil | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.233s | 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. hadlock ◴[] No.44641737[source]
This completely ignores the need for baseload generation. Wind and solar will probably always be cheaper, but the power grid will likely always need a diverse array of power supplies. If your photovalic cell factories get bombed, how will you make more? If Egypt were 100% solar powered, it would be trivial to defeat them in a war by shooting less than a million dollars of artillery shells into their solar plants, leaving everyone in the dark in perpetuity. Japan was almost wholly dependent on the US for oil and coal before the US pulled their delivery contracts which was partly why they bombed pearl harbor, they had little to no power diversity. Nuclear and hydro will always backstop grid energy, even if solar becomes free or net negative.