The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

[LP]

I see reports of fusion energy being the silver bullet for future needs are starting to appear again,  with several countries making big investments. This has been discussed ever since I  can remember, a looong time.

ITER is the frontline effort and it is based in France.

I measure the quality of those fusion predictions against the knowledge that France is committed to building a fleet of next generation nuclear fission reactors. Surely if the fusion solution was genuinely close France wouldn't be doing that! :o

btw., Australia chose not to be involved in ITER, apparently all nuclear fission or fusion is bad for Australia, excluding so long as we can keep selling our uranium to France and China nuclear is NIMBY and therefore uranium sales are all good! A pretty pissweak effort by our politicians and bureaucrats all around, and lacking foresight.

If fusion comes good solar, wind, tidal, geothermal are all dead in the water, none of them can provided 24x7 base load. Fission will also be dead in the water overnight. Hydrogen will also be massively impacted and it will signal the end for fossil fuels. So not being part of fusion research is pretty short-sighted.

I'm not surprised we are not involved in ITER or KSTAR. I remember driving past protestors to get into the Synchrotron in Clayton when it was being built, apparently when they switched it on a black hole would form over Monash Uni and we were all going to disappear up our own sphincters! Some of those protestors back then are probably politicians and bureaucrats now!