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I don’t think the technicals even matter.
What matters now is:
Popular public perception.
Incentives for decision makers.
And lobbying funds to sway both.
And this makes it tricky:
Fission looks bad to a layman. It’s scary, and failures and the waste feel dangerous no matter what the reality is. It’s a perfect fit for social media clickbait too.
New fission plants are a long term investment. They’re expensive, up front. In other words, they don’t yield any political points before a governor’s or mayor’s or or CEO’s term ends, basically, while even renewables like solar or wind are faster to set up.
There is a sizable nuclear lobby. This is a plus. But Oil will crush it like a bug if it gets “too big” and appreciably threatens petro power.
So as much as I love it, I thinks the best we can hope for in most regions is “recommissioning old plants.”
And to be clear, fusion is a completely different category to me.
I think it’s a waste of precious funds, and is “hopium” for the public. It’s theoretically interesting, but even with a breakthrough, in best-case scenarios, it’s still gonna be expensive to maintain and have many drawbacks. Some are even worse than fission (like more extreme neutron radiation irradiating and eroding components, and stupendously high up-front costs).
I think the funds would be better allocated towards maser drilling for geothermal and cheaper solar cells. And these would yield quicker political points, too, like coal/gas plants quickly converted to geothermal, or mass produced, cheap “backyard solar” the average person can buy and make money with.
Solar cells are getting cheaper anyway, there's no stopping that. And the oncoming oil shortages are going to make the oil lobby look like a joke.
The oil lobby is not a joke. Underestimating them has been one of environmentalists’ biggest mistakes, ever.
…And the oil shortage will make them fabulously rich.
Doubt
And yet here we are, with the far right absolutely exploding in Europe as people clamor for more drilling, and climate change and renewables branded “woke” in the US, and much of the world increasing emissions still.
Guess who the groups stoking this are getting funding from?
As another example, my (scientifically minded) Dad showed me a WSJ article, just the other day, on how geoengineering makes any “risk” of climate change a non issue. The whole argument was that the economically optimal path forward was doubling down on petro.
Also, solar cells are cheap, but if we put fusion’s funding into them and geothermal, I think they’d be dramatically cheaper and more available by now.
Technology really doesn't work like that, putting more money into something doesn't make something available sooner. The hope of fusion should not delay solutions now. Solar is good and growing rapidly.