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I think that solar/wind + battery (e.g. Tesla Megapack) will make fusion irrelevant.
Won't batteries run into the Lithium problem? I heard somewhere that the global Lithium reserves allow us to convert the entire car fleet of humanity to electric, but not anything beyond that, certainly not allowing large scale battery deployments that would make a dent.
I'm just a layperson, I only know pop science level stuff here, but they seem clearly like the best game in town -- so, seriously, can a person in the physics world shed some light on why they aren't at least a small part of every article about fusion, but ITER is?
1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC_(tokamak)
(And, for those with an interest who still haven't seen Zach Hartwig's absolutely excellent 2017 talk: https://youtu.be/L0KuAx1COEk -- watch it!)
I think that solar/wind + battery (e.g. Tesla Megapack) will make fusion irrelevant.
I still think weather does not allow this triplet to cover all scenarios. There are times in the PNW where you won't see the sun for 2-3 weeks, long enough to deplete almost any grid storage solution
How much of the excess renewable energy is being wasted rather than stored? Maybe fuel generation like hydrogen or ethanol, or kinetic can help make nuclear less crucial?
Right now it's cheaper to deploy fossil fuels than using one of the more expensive storage technologies. Hopefully with time the price will come down though. Trends are quite promising.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still think weather does not allow this triplet to cover all scenarios. There are times in the PNW where you won't see the sun for 2-3 weeks, long enough to deplete almost any grid storage solution
While not due to cloud coverage, this is why Texas runs super large transmission lines from West Texas wind farms to Houston oil refineries.
For all Musk's faults, he recognizes such timelines are untenable, and pushes people to do the 'impossible'.
Meanwhile, reportedly China has already built one and is testing it now. So the USA is 20 years behind?
I think that solar/wind + battery (e.g. Tesla Megapack) will make fusion irrelevant.
Won't batteries run into the Lithium problem? I heard somewhere that the global Lithium reserves allow us to convert the entire car fleet of humanity to electric, but not anything beyond that, certainly not allowing large scale battery deployments that would make a dent.
One of my favorite debunkers of these terrible rumors and studies is Auke Hoestra. One of his more recent debunkings, in addition to being very wrong on the facts, was funded by a shell of Aston Martin, and shilled without criticism by several "journalists" in UK papers:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/astongate-fake-emission-figur...
Those in the renewable industry are too busy building to mount much of a defense. Perhaps once they've become rich and indolent they can start acting this way.
Also, as a side note, a typical electric car battery is enough to power the typical US house for three days. Three days of storage is probably more than we will need to get to 100% renewable energy. The very idea of converting cars to electric entails an amount of batteries that most skeptics will say is impossible. Yet we know it won't be that hard, as new reserves are developed all the time.
Serious question: how does an article like this get written without mentioning SPARC[1] once? They're hardly secretive, they're MIT's people, they're moving on a plan to get results in ~5 years, and they're talking about the same kind of things: tokamaks, better computer modeling, and easier to make higher temperature superconductors for stronger magnets. I'm just a layperson, I only know pop science level stuff here…
Are we going to wait until the sea level rises 20 feet and then say, geez, compared to the costs this imposed, fusion would have been easy?