I know that the fusion “ignition” achieved last week has no short term impact on energy infrastructure. Still, an important milestone was crossed.
Realistically, it will likely be several more decades before we can get to where fusion begins to live up to its potential as an energy source. But what will happen then?
In particular, if energy were to one day become vastly cheaper and vastly higher capacity, what would change? It seems to me that two obvious places are computation and transportation.
Currently about 30% of the cost of taking a long flight is the cost of fuel. But what if the cost of fuel went down by a factor of 100, or 1000?
In that case it might make sense to use far more energy for the same flight. And that might make it possible rethink the entire process. Some future variation on flight technology, designed around greater energy capacity, could end up being much cheaper.
And of course computation is bound mainly by the availability of electric power. Server farms are energy hogs, and the relationship of “energy in == computation out” is pretty well defined.
If it were possible to draw 100 or 1000 times more power, we could completely rethink the economics of computation. A.I. algorithms that currently take minutes or hours could be run at interactive rates — with every individual getting their own generous slice of the pie.
Imagine the possibilities.
Research progress is great. On the other hands, I concern our (human) progress. We tend to remove safety measure if it costs. That makes technology irrelevant that we have it or not. My university town is next to Fukushima. So, I still recall the accident. The same tsunami hits to a few reactors. When the tsunami hits, all Tepco’s reactors broke, but Tohoku Electric Power(TEP)’s reactors survived. Both are given the data there were 15m high tsunami 500 years ago. Tepco lowered the reactor since the water pumping is cheaper. TEP’s Onagawa reactor keeps the height because they respect the data and safety measure. Tepco was rewarded as they were clever since they lower the 0.1 million dollar/year cost for pumping cooling water. Now they need to pay at least 100billion/year still (which they cannot, so tax payer pays). I see the problem is not the technology, but the human progress. Can we manage such super technology? That is my concern. I love technology progress. But I don’t know our mind progress. I sometimes feel we are kids. We probably should not have lighters if our mind development is still five years old. Everyday news told some politics. I wonder most of them are mature adult? I see some 60-80 years old body (e.g., Senate election nominees, …) who seems to have 5 years old minds. I probably should feel ok these people have nuclear fusion technology. Or am I too naive?