ZzzzzzzzzzzzzKABOOOOOM!zzzzzzzzzzzz!
I love the smell of Fusion Power in the morning! What’s that Scotty?! Yes it does not need dilithium crystals! Tesla we can rebuild your towers now. Haha! Well well Anons, guess what just happened this morning? Houston We Have Stable Fusion Ignition. Stable! Boooooom!
https://www.cnet.com/science/fusion-energy-breakthrough-major-milestone-achieved-in-us-experiment/
https://phys.org/news/2022-12-scientists-fusion-energy-breakthrough.html
nuclear and fusion may be similar, but the only nuclear has an actual industry, infrastructure, and workers, and has been proven to work. i'm not saying fusion is automatically bad, but we can't just blindly trust it when it hasn't proven itself to be "much better" yet. it may be, but we must be cautious.
fusion is nuclear. We currently use fission. They have been seeking a breakthrough on fusion because once you are able to get it to work (which they finally have small scale) its not only more efficient, it eliminates the possibility of a meltdown
Fission works just fine, with a century of safe experience. Fusion is nowhere. It is not "more efficient." It wastes most of its reaction energy in the production of 14 MeV neutrons, which transmute the first wall structure into long-term radioactive waste,. Advanced fission reactors preclude the possibility of a meltdown (and even old ones like the CANDU reactor), If the news you are thinking about pertains to the ITER reactor, there is a considerable scandal about that being oversold.
Why are we working on fusion reactions? It is a convenient way for the Department of Energy to research fusion reactions, to better understand how to design bombs. Fusion power has been "30 years away" for the past 50 years.
Fission is not infinitely scaleable, nor is basically any energy technology we have today. As the population size grows, and our hopes of becoming a space faring civilization and the bounties that we will find after that fact, we need to continue researching and developing new energy technologies, and ways to store them.
Or do you think lithium batteries are the end point of energy storage, and we should just give up on trying to develop new methods that are less destructive to the environment and the people who inhabit it?
There's no sense to saying that "fission is not infinitely scaleable." Nothing is. The point is that fission is reduced to practice and there are huge reserves of fissionables.
I think lithium batteries are a fad. The best form of energy storage is hydrocarbon fuel. It is ridiculous to think that lithium is less destructive to the environment.