Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Commercially Viable Fusion Energy: actually < 30 years away

Lots of interesting new developments in the field. Several private institutions are developing fusion technology.

The most promising is the ITER project (initiated 1985) built in France and operated by a multinational team. This promises to be the first example of a fusion reactor which will actually produce more energy than it requires to operate the containment magnets. It is planned to be fully operational by 2035 and should produce 500 Mwatts.

Safe fuel, the oceans are full of it. Yes you have to make the Tritium, but that will become part of the reactor process. And zero emissions. Zero toxic byproducts. No meltdowns. No explosions. If containment fails, the fuel Hydrogen gets cold and the reaction simply stops.

More advanced and more efficient containment technologies are in the pipeline.

Few of us will still be around to see it. But there may well be a hydrocarbon free future available by 2050.

All the sudden the Middle East will become as irrelevant as it was before Henry Ford built the model T.

My first psuedo-scientific "paper" was written on this subject back in 8'th grade Science class 1969. Keeping up on the developments has been an interest of mine since. I am excited to see the research finally beginning to bear fruit.

And for the dolts here who are saying we will always need petrol for consumer goods:

Yea, no chit, sherlocks.

I am not arguing the need for petrol for plastics, rubber, etc. Don't be deliberately obtuse.

The post is about energy for power grids and large scale needs. Not your 40cc chainsaw.

Go [bleep] in your hat.
The topic of 0% hydrocarbon came up.
When absolutes are introduced, you immediately have problems
in your argument.

It was logical to point out the many uses of hydrocarbon bases.
Not all, nobody has that much time.

As for 40cc chainsaws?
There is already battery tech to handle that.
And those saws aren't usually operated for long periods. (Except by trimmers)
It's bigger saws where there would be issues.

Few of us will still be around to see it. But there may well be a hydrocarbon free future available by 2050.

What has changed is a slow but continuous advance in the science of magnetic containment fields as well as advances in the materials required to withstand the extreme heat of the environment.

There are dozens of small tokomak fusion reactors running in the world right now. But at present scale, they require more energy for containment than they produce.