So you changed your mind from coal ?
Coal good for chicken
We’ve seen this coming. We’ve been moving in this direction incrementally,” said Mike Donaldson, a vice president at the fusion development company General Fusion. “So I don’t think this actually takes any years off the timeline.”
The fusion industry has estimated that deployment of nuclear fusion projects would begin in the early 2030s, although the industry does not necessarily have a history of sticking to its timelines. In 2012, the National Ignition Facility’s director
predicted that fusion technology would be commercially viable in 10 years, meaning about now.
Donaldson emphasized that the lab’s work is significant in proving the core science is sound. But he said developers will need to prove the next step: “What is really up to us right now is to build on this to produce practical electricity-producing machines.”
Any results that DOE presents will need to be repeatable to be considered scientifically, said Ed Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Questions also remain on how safe fusion reactors would be, given that tritium, one of the main fuels in fusion reactors, is radioactive and the fusion process itself produces dangerous amounts of heat and pressure, Lyman said.
“Not to downplay things if they’ve actually done it, but just take it with a big grain of salt,” Lyman said. “It will be more than a little late for achieving decarbonization. We really need to do that in the next decade or two, and even the most optimistic estimates wouldn’t have fusion power until the 2040s.”
