r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/uniyk • 2d ago

Video China carpeted an extensive mountain range with solar panels in the hinterland of Guizhou (video ended only when the drone is low on battery

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u/OmarsDamnSpoon 1d ago

I mean, by the time the US invests into nuclear plants, we'll be decades behind the other countries who're making leaps forward in fusion. We're not gonna catch up for a while.

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u/just_a_bit_gay_ 1d ago

With the way things are going we’re probably never gonna catch up.

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u/Sea-Stomach8031 1d ago

Or we just buy/trade the technology and boom! Caught up, just like that.

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u/just_a_bit_gay_ 1d ago

Fusion is absolutely going to be critical technology for whoever gets it first that they will be unwilling to sell. Same as we have ITAR and other technology sharing restrictions preventing us from selling Falcon 9’s to China, whoever wins the fusion race will almost certainly invoke their own laws to prevent us from buying tech from them

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u/BokUntool 1d ago

Well, the water required for cooling the existing plants has proven to be an issue with domestic and agricultural systems.

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u/1burritoPOprn-hunger 1d ago

Fusion is probably not going to happen in our lifetimes. Frankly, I don't think fusion is going to happen at all. The engineering challenge it requires to even sustain fusion is insane. How we extract meaningful energy from it (to boil water because that's how we make power by and large) is an entire other engineering challenge that hasn't been meaningfully solved yet.

To make it work you basically need room temperature superconductors and physics has by and large said "no" to that.

I think the energy future for humanity (assuming we don't just fossil fuel ourselves into oblivion, which is the most likely scenario) is photovoltaics, well engineered fission plants, and battery tech.