That aside, its exciting times ahead if we do get a viable Fusion reactor in our lifetime. It will fundamentally change how humanity functions as a society in my opinion.
I disagree. I worked for 6 years in a Tokamak Fusion
Research Lab.
Research is important there, because fusion was never planned or achieved. The goal was to study plasma confinement in toroids (tokamaks). While that doesn't make me an expert, I was a physics student part of that time and I did look into many issues since I was very interested.
At the time, the big selling points (fusion-ophile points) were no runaways (meltdowns/accidents)(for magnetic containment), limitless fuel and no nuclear waste.
The last 2 are quite deceptive. Controlled fusion is very difficult, and the easiest reaction (lowest ignition temperature) is
2H -
3H (deuterium - tritium). There's plenty of deuterium in seawater, but tritium has to be produced from lithium, which is limited enough to be a consideration. But that's the "little" problem. The big problem is that reaction produces neutrons, which bombard the inner wall of the containment vessel, making them radioactive. Within a fairly short time (5-10 years?), the inner wall will be degraded to the point of needing replacement. And they will be highly radioactive (nuclear waste). At that time (70's-80's), it was expected that the walls would need very exotic and constrained metals.
Those problems would be solved with a neutron-less reaction. But the easiest neutron-less reaction (proton-boron) is something like 10 times more difficult to produce.
I hope these problems are being solved, but fusion is hardly an energy panacea. Also, it's been a while, but all the estimates I saw from the 60's through the 90's said energy-breakeven in about 10-15 years, economic breakeven in about 20 years and reactors online in about 30. All the estimates... 60's-90's. I wonder what the estimates/promises are today
