Then they are wrong. The biggest problem is efficiently gathering energy from the fusion reaction. Right now, we can only get a tiny fraction (less than 1%) of the energy out. If that can't be raised to 50% or so, fusion will never happen.
"I just can’t see any circumstances under which steam engines are “coming back” and becoming competitive for electricity no matter how cheap the firebox fuel is."
Industrial grade steam is still widely used and that probably won't ever change except to move from steam to supercritical CO2 and then only for power production. Most steam is used to do other things that are critically important to modern society. The biggest one is to make fertilizer without which we can't feed most of the planet. Your understanding of how industry works is fundamentally flawed.
You are ignoring that the plasma would ignite the O2 in the air. You are also ignoring what happens when several hundred MW of energy (at about 1,000,000C) under pressure is released instantly. Anytime you have a powerplant with enough energy to be economically viable, releasing that energy at once will be a problem. Even FF PPs can explode quite violently.
> You are ignoring that the plasma would ignite the O2 in the air.
What does this even mean?
> You are also ignoring what happens when several hundred MW of energy (at about 1,000,000C) under pressure is released instantly.
If you have a gram of hydrogen at a million degrees, it can continue putting out several hundred MW for about a fiftieth of a second.
Even if it somehow gets outside the machine with no heat loss to the structure, by the time it mixes with a few cubic meters of air it'll be down to 1000C or less.
My point is, that's a pretty positive view of fusion. They think it's too good to be true, but if it actually happens then I doubt many people will suddenly switch into thinking it's a dirty old explodey thing like fission's public image.
"My question is more about the safety of locating one smack in the middle of a city. "
We don't put any other type of powerplant in a city, so why would we do it for fusion? That being said, fusion won't happen in our lifetimes and even when we do get it, we probably will never really use it. Fission is just better in almost every way. It makes 5x the power per amount of fuel, it makes far less neutrons, and the temperature generated is far more usable. Oh, and fusion absolutely makes radioactive waste and a fusion failure makes a meltdown (which doesn't have to be a failure case for fission) look like a Sunday picnic.
"and we might as well just throw renewables at the problem now instead of waiting."
We have spent about $10T on renewables over the last 20 years. We use more FF today than 20 years ago because renewables don't provide enough power to compensate for the normal yearly increase in energy demand (which is pathetic). The solution is nuclear (fission). It was the solution before we were born. It will be the solution after we die. No amount of politics and propaganda will ever change that. The laws of physics care nothing about what you think.
No, its because the Chinese subsidize the costs of those cars. Say I live in a country that will pay me $50k to build a car. It costs me say, $55K to build the car which I now sell for $60K. How you do you, in a country that pays you nothing to build cars, compete? This is an extreme example but its what is happening here (just will different and smaller numbers).
Every time when any competitive Chinese product is discussed, there are claims that it is competitive because it is subsidized.
Perhaps many of these claims are true, but at least in USA I also see huge amounts of subsidies for a lot of products, which are never compared with the Chinese subsidies.
I have never heard about any significant investment in some factory in the USA, which was not conditioned by very large reductions in taxes for that company. I do not see any difference between this and any subsidies that China might have.
Even if there might exist some kind of subsidizing system for electric vehicles in China, there is no doubt that there exists healthy competition between many Chinese companies, so they continuously innovate in EVs, while much less efforts in this direction can be seen in countries like USA, who claim to be scared by the Chinese "unfair" competition, but they seem to do very little or nothing to reduce their technical inferiority.
Then the US should have done like the EU and apply anti-subsidy countermeasures -- and show before impartial WTO arbitrators the adequacy of the mesures.
But of course the US (or Canada) can't justify their 100% duty in those terms, so they don't even try.
GM and Chrysler were given 85 BILLION dollars that has never been repaid (never will) despite them paying their CEOs tens of millions per year, doing stock buy backs.
At least the Chinese got good cars from subsidizing their auto makers. Americans just got ripped off.
that is absolutely not the problem. We have more than enough li, subject to cost of extraction. New chemistries dont even need it. you need to update your talking points.
This is the best comment on this article but it was deleted for some reason.
"The meta-law of software engineering: All laws of software engineering will be immediately misinterpreted and mindlessly applied in a way that would horrify their originators. Now that we can observe the behaviour of LLMs that are missing key context, we can understand why."
Or, you can't boil down decades of wisdom and experience into a pithy, 1 sentence quote.
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