With the Orange Cheeto in office and things getting more difficult for him every day, that’s what I’m worried about. 
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Luckily ITER is in France and only partly funded by the US.
So…we’re not gonna die after all?
But couldn’t we clean it up… for free? And think of the jobs!
I didn’t know that D+D fusion made helium-3 instead of regular helium. Physics is complicated. Fixed, and thank you.
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Ya, the sub-atomic version of a Diesel engine character of this design appeals to me. Should be good and loud, too 
Thanks, will check out Dennis Whyte
I waswith you until the goalpost-moving “no downside” for solar and wind. They work incredibly well even though they have been starved in favor of fossil fuels. In fact, they’re actively opposed by the US government. But they still spread and prosper.
But no. They have to be perfect.
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Except for the proliferation issues, and the way the fission products are extremely radioactive (on a time scale of years to decades rather than millennia, but still), and did I mention the proliferation issues inherent in reprocessing spent fuel?
if we can make it work, a fusion reactor would be something you could build anywhere without anyone getting hot under the collar about nuclear weapons issues.
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Contradictio in adjecto?
As the skeptics say, “Fusion is the technology of the future…and always will be.” 
Realistically, since controlled deuterium-tritium nuclear fusion has been demonstrated, it’s pretty much a colossal engineering challenge to reach sustained break-even point. 15 years? Probably more like 40 to 50, and in any event I’ll believe it when I see it. Still glad philanthropists are putting some money into it though, as it’s a relatively cost-effect investment to get off fossil fuels and fission which, if and when it pays off, will be well worth it.
Depending on it to put the breaks on climate change though is stupid and irresponsible. Even 15 years won’t be nearly in time for that, and it won’t be viable, experimentally let alone commercially, in 15 years.
Well not JUST materials science. It’ll be an unprecedented logistical challenge (sourcing raw material, transport of material, large scale space-based manufacturing) and probably will require some Nobel-winning economics research to decide when it’s worth the effort.
"The world has been waiting for fusion for a long time.”
Not really, relatively speaking. Unless it’s possible to wait for something without even suspecting its existence.
We’re all gonna die. But hopefully not all at together.
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I’ll take it!
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In the heady days of warmongering idiots setting off increasingly large-yield thermonuclear bombs, when the mechanics of fusion were not nearly as well understood, there was some concern that a sufficiently large device could ignite a nuclear chain reaction in the atmosphere and destroy the Earth a la Dr. Strangelove. Obviously that never happened and we now know couldn’t, but it was a real concern at the time.
Anyway, a star depends on a fairly delicate balance between its own gravity and the fusion chain reaction at its core. Unless you know a way to generate that gravity without stellar mass, we won’t be making that on Earth.
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I wonder if it’s possible for a reactor to go out of control and accidentally create an unstable rapidly expanding cloud of superheated gas travelling at a significant fraction of the speed of light, centered on where the planet earth used to be.
Such questions were explicitly studied as part of the Manhattan project. At the time, the answer was, “no, because if it did. we’d see evidence for it throughout the observable universe”. I wonder to this day if that answer still holds given that we’ve since seen the universe through the eyes of the Hubble telescope, and seen a universe that’s much more crazy and chaotic than anyone could have imagined in 1941.
And so we’ll just heat up the atmosphere with the waste from local fusion energy instead of trapping the remote fusion energy via CO2.
When the containment fails on a fusion reactor the reaction stops immediately. As soon as the pressure drops there’s just nothing except some rapidly expanding and cooling plasma. Might damage the reactor but nothing major I would think.
Again I’m going to say no, largely because reactor fusion depends heavily on containment, so once it’s not contained the fusion rate would drop precipitously.
The reason fission reactor accidents result in runaway is because the unabated neutron flux can induce fission in the entire fuelstock. A shockwave moving outward from a breached fusion reactor cannot induce appreciable fusion reactions in the atoms of the atmosphere, there’s just not enough energy; if there were, the Chicxulub event would have incinerated the Earth long before our pregenitor voles knew what hit them.
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