Sunday Energy Post coming soon, but in the mean time, a mini-post related to energy:

As nuclear fusion seems to finally be coming close to reality, it's becoming more and more apparent this whole thing is bit of a Booby Prize.

Fusion was originally touted as the key to Infinite Clean Energy, but all of it's supposed advantages have qualifications that make it really not that good at all.

1. "Fusion is done with abundant hydrogen" - No, it's done with deuterium and tritium, which are isotopes of hydrogen and are actually pretty rare. Deuterium isn't rare enough to be a real supply constraint, but tritium is. Ironically the best way to make tritium is in a (classical) fission reactor...

2. "Fusion doesn't make nuclear waste" - Hahaha, maybe not in the fundamental reaction itself, but what do you suppose happens when that neutron flies off and slams into part of the reactor? A lot of what's generally called "radioactive waste" is not actually spent fuel, but rather normal things that have been exposed to enough radiation that they are now considered radioactive.

3. "Fusion will be easier" - Noooooo. In a classical nuclear plant, you bring fuel close to other fuel and they spontaneously begin exchanging neutrons and doing fission. In a fusion reactor, you use electricity to make plasma and then you heat and confine it to temperatures and pressures that are unseen on earth outside of a nuclear bomb, and only THEN does fusion begin to occur.

So the conclusion is that while fusion is an interesting thing to be able to do, trying to extract energy from it is really kind of a pointless exercise. And table-top fusion has been possible since the 1960s when Philo Farnsworth (the farm boy who invented the CRT television tube) figured out how to do it in a (near) vacuum.

There are youtubers who build and run Farnsworth Fusors and are able to get meaningful amounts of neutron radiation off of them.

But I would argue that if half the effort that has gone into self-sustaining fusion had instead gone into molten salt reactors, we would have actually gotten the more-or-less infinite energy that we were promised.