Thread by @BambroughKevin

I’m honestly amazed that when the #Fusion news broke it was celebrated due to terrible reporting, the first articles I read had me thinking it was at least somewhat significant. #uranium

Spoiler: it’s not. It’s just another sad example of bad reporting newrepublic.com/article/169504…

The first articles I read had me doing a little digging because I wanted to understand more about the fuel ingredients and the cost of the fuel production etc (energy going into fuel). I quickly discovered that one of the key ingredients is extremely rare and can only be sourced

Sourced in size from waste of a Candu #Nuclear power plant. And that we don’t even have enough stockpiled to ‘jumpstart’ the would be first comercial fusion reactor and run it long enough so that it can breed its one fuel. So we are at best decades away and…

And we will have serious challenges producing enough #fusion reactor fuel for a meaningful roll out.

But as we dig further in to the development we find that the lasers used to power the fusion consume 100x more power than they put out.

Hard to believe anyone with any understanding of net energy could possibly tout the small positive net energy production that occurred within the reactor as being at all significant. It’s nothing more than a rather meaningless footnote 👇

300mj of energy in yielded 3mj of energy out. 99% energy waste without calculating the energy required to create reactor and its fuel. I had no idea that fusion reactors are so monumentally far away from being truly net energy positive.