Gosh I hope ASAP

@EndAion fusion on the grid is no panacea. people go back and forth about "scientific breakeven" and "engineering breakeven" but the toughest bottleneck of all is "economic breakeven", when actually selling fusion electrons on the grid becomes profitable. fusion energy is a capital-intensive project (high startup costs) with rare and expensive fuel (high operating costs); fusion electricity will have to be below 15~20¢/kWh in other to compete against even implicitly expensive peaker power plants (not that fusion power will be particularly amenable to intermittent operation). it will need to break 10~15¢/kWh to compete with conventional nuclear fission, 5~10¢/kWh to beat most fossil fuels (without a carbon tax) and would have to shatter <2¢/kWh to put peak wind/solar out of business. these are ambitious targets for an Nth-of-a-kind fusion unit, which will take many years of iteration on an inevitably-more-expensive first-of-a-kind unit.

I wish fusion power technologists all the best of luck and I hope to see them succeed in my lifetime. but I'm under no illusions that such success would produce a fantasy utopia of unlimited power "too cheap to meter". rightfully or wrongfully, you can ask the nuclear scientists of the 50s how that dream panned out:

@pyrylium I appreciate the long reply, thanks. You have good points I didn’t think about

@pyrylium thanks for the interesting take! I created a market to speculate on this, I think you saw it already but I'm linking it here in case it can be interesting for others